Introduction

Everything you do is philosophical.

You wake in the morning, groan, stretch and open your eyes. What is happening?

Everything that is happening is philosophical.

How do you know you are awake? How do you know it is morning? How do you know your eyes are open? How do you know your dreaming has ended and your day has begun?

How do you know your memories of yesterday – or ten years ago – are valid? How do you even know you are the same person as the one who got into bed last night?

It gets even crazier, when you really think about it.

How do you know that your “experience” is not in fact some elaborate simulation? Do you know for certain that you are not a brain in a tank, wired up to some Matrix-style virtual reality?

Look at your hand right now. You see a hand, sure, but how do you know that the hand truly exists outside of your mind? Sure, you see your hand, but the image only shows up in your mind. It’s the same with your sensations of your hand – they also only show up in your mind. Where is the hand itself?

Last night, in your dreams, you also had hands – or claws, or tentacles, or heaven knows what –that did not exist or move in what you call the “real world.” In your dreams, you visited a floating island full of dragons that does not exist outside your dreamscape – or does it? Perhaps your dreams are the real world, and your “waking” life is the dream. How can you know for certain?

Perhaps the people you live with are mere avatars – artificial intelligence simulations of human beings. Perhaps they were all real people at some point, but have been replaced by space aliens with perfect biological robots. When you went to a movie last night, perhaps the entire cinema complex was a form of elaborate theatre – perhaps you were in a movie, watching a movie.

What if you are created anew every day from scratch, but with a steady if inconsistent series of progressive memories layered into your newly hatched brain?

What about your memory?

Is it real? Recalled events are gone, lost in time; your memory only exists in your mind. What if you or something else is altering it over time?

Think of your very first memory – is it real? Think of other early memories – could they have been created in your mind by stories you heard as a child?

Try this on for size: go and visit your childhood neighbourhood. I guarantee you that it will neither look nor feel exactly as you remember it – and sometimes not even approximately, even if little has changed.

Look at a picture of yourself as a child – where has that child gone? When you build a foundation for a house, the finished house still has that foundation. But what still remains of your childhood body and mind? You are not like some Russian doll with smaller versions of yourself remaining inside. The human body is replaced over time – every seven years, with little to nothing left from your past physical self. Where are your memories? Are your memories like the childhood game of Broken Telephone, irretrievably lost in endless translation?

Invite childhood friends and siblings over for dinner and discuss shared past events – what perceptions do you all have in common? I guarantee you that others will have very strong memories that significantly differ from yours – sometimes even opposing them completely. What does this mean? You were all in the same place, experiencing the same things – but you have very different memories. Nothing remains of the events except the memories, the interpretations, and everyone’s story about the events – so tell me, what is real? If everyone has a different idea of what happened, what actually happened? Can anyone tell?

If you have home movies of your childhood, sit down with your family and review them – what are the various interpretations of what is “objectively” happening on the screen? When your sister made fun of you, was it playful ribbing, as she remembers, or was it painful teasing, as you remember? Even recorded “objectivity” rarely leads to objectivity.

Even if you remember the same events as your siblings, you can each end up with entirely opposing interpretations. A father hits his children – one child remembers violent abuse, the other remembers stern but loving discipline. A sister believes it made her a better person, a brother believes it harmed him deeply.

A mother has an affair – her daughter sympathizes with her loneliness; her son condemns her as selfish.

You grew up poor – you resent it, your brother thinks it built character.

One of your toddlers loves the noisy vacuum cleaner – the other screams and flees in terror. Is either interpretation the true nature of the vacuum cleaner? Is it a fun noisemaker, or a terrifying monster?

One mother loves cooking for her family; another resents it as a repetitive chore.

Let us go deeper – as we can always go deeper.

Here is another challenge: you claim that you have an identity and that you are your own person, of course – but what does that really mean? Let us say that you are a Christian, and you consider your religion a feature of your own personal identity. If at birth you had been adopted by a Zoroastrian family, you would surely have been brought up in that family’s religion, and you would now consider being a Zoroastrian part of your own personal identity. If you were brought up in a house of Democrats, or liberals, or leftists, you would likely be more willing to inherit that political perspective.

How much of you is distinct from what you have inherited? If you merely inherited a trait, is it really you?

How much of your personality is largely inherited, genetic, and beyond your capacity to change significantly? How much of yourself do you think you have chosen, earned, built with your own mental bare hands? How often do you condemn other people’s personalities, as if other people somehow magically just chose who they are?

What if your judgmental nature is not completely your choice, but partly genetic?

You say that you are tall or short – but height is also a function of your genetics, not your own personal, earned identity. You can take pride in parts of your personality and achievements – you may be hard-working or very honest – but significant aspects of your personality and achievements are genetic. Your intelligence is largely genetic, your conscientiousness, your level of social comfort, your charisma – these largely arise from unchosen biological influences, though we often take personal pride in that which we have biologically inherited.

Do you consider yourself a conservative, liberal, or something else? If you are a male conservative, did you know that trait is 64.5% heritable? For women, it is 44.7%.^[1]

To describe yourself, you need language, of course. If English is your native tongue, you possess a unique set of words by which you may describe yourself – some of which do not even exist in other languages.

Think of how much of your personal identity, that which you call a “self,” has been influenced by the work of others – writers and moviemakers and actors and singers and teachers and so on.

Your language, your culture, your family, your schooling, some of your accidental exposures to the thoughts and feelings of others – all of these influences have shaped you, but they did not originate within you.

Even if you could accurately say, “I was influenced by Bob,” you have merely moved the chain of causality one step away. Who was Bob influenced by? How many of his capacities and perspectives were chosen? Were you influenced by Bob’s thoughts or Bob’s genetics? How can the things that influenced you – or Bob – be accurately separated?

Perhaps we are all just predetermined dominoes falling on each other under the pretense of choice.

So what does it mean to have an identity, to be yourself, when so little of who you are was completely self-generated?

Do you see what I mean?

Everything we do is philosophical.

When most people think of the word “faith,” they generally refer to a belief in God – but it is much more accurate to say that we have “faith” in reality. We have faith in ourselves, our existence, memories or history, our relationships, the evidence of our senses, the virtue of our choices – we have few if any real philosophical certainties in these areas. We accept what we have to in order to survive, to get through the day, to find shelter and food – and love, hopefully.

Your young son steals a candy bar from a store – you rebuke him, march him back into the store, perhaps punish him – but why? What objective, universal moral principles did your son violate? How do you know that they are true or good? Where do they exist in reality? Do you punish your son because you fear the disapproval of others? Are you afraid that people will think you are a bad parent because you raised a thief? Do you punish your son because there is a subjective social convention against stealing? Is that how you describe it to him? No, surely, you will tell him that it is wrong to steal, that he is bad for stealing, that it is immoral and so on. But – how do you know? If you are Christian, you have a pretty good idea – one of the Ten Commandments is Thou shalt not steal. But that exists in the realm of theology, not philosophy.

If you are atheist or agnostic – how do you know that stealing is wrong? Because it makes people unhappy? That argument is scarcely philosophical – a lot of things make people unhappy, without being immoral. A negative movie review makes the filmmakers unhappy – and can cost them millions of dollars – but it is neither illegal nor immoral to write a negative movie review, if you write it honestly. Also, your son can argue that getting the candy bar without paying makes him happy, so it totally evens out.

Perhaps you invoke the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – and ask your son if he would like it if others stole from him. However, he may just reply that he does not care, and then what could you say? Maybe he is the biggest kid around, and no one would dare! Relying on his empathy for his future self and for the feelings of others only works if he already has empathy.

Most morality is like a diet book for slim people. If you are morally sensitive, then you will generally accept moral arguments, but then you tend to be the kind of person least in need of moral arguments. Morality needs to be powerful enough to overcome the indifference of truly selfish people. Morality that requires the leverage of self-criticism has virtually no power over narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths, who have little to no capacity for self-criticism. If you care about others, you will most likely be good, with or without moral arguments – if you do not care, moral arguments will have no real sway over you.

When you start to explore definitions, the question of theft becomes even more complicated. If “theft” means taking property without permission, or using force, against the will of its legitimate owner, then what is taxation? If you try to legitimize taxation by appealing to the democratic will of the majority, aren’t you just encouraging your son to get a few friends to go with him to the convenience store, where they will then outvote the owner on who gets the candy bars? Can immorality be legitimized by the majority? If two men vote to rape one woman, surely that does not make rape any less immoral? Surely our highest aspirations as moral instructors cannot be to teach our children to submit to or join the majority mob.

Perhaps we teach our children that self-sacrifice is the highest universal moral ideal – that they should give up their own preferences and aspirations in order to serve the needs of others. But if self-sacrifice is a universal moral ideal, then it cannot possibly be applied universally. If Bob sacrifices for Doug, then Doug cannot simultaneously sacrifice for Bob. There are those who sacrifice, and those who collect that sacrifice – those who pay, and those who receive. If self-sacrifice is a universal moral ideal, then those who collect that sacrifice, rather than provide it, must be immoral, since they are profiting from other people’s self-sacrifice, rather than sacrificing themselves. But if the highest moral ideal requires other people to be immoral, how can it be universally good?

Perhaps we teach our children that they should obey authority figures – listen to your teacher, obey your father, etc. However, they then learn from history that horrifying atrocities were often committed by those obeying authority figures. Sometimes, perhaps it is good to obey authority figures – other times, it is a great evil to obey authority figures – how can we teach them the difference? Is there a moral authority higher than secular authority? How are morals justified? How do we know?

The Tortures of Philosophy

We currently have a tortured relationship with philosophy. We need it to get out of bed in the morning and get anything done with our lives. But we cannot examine it too closely, for fear of mental or moral disintegration. It is like the Aristotelian mean – too little philosophy makes us animalistic, too much tempts impotent madness. We desperately need rules in society, but we recoil from examining our rules too closely for fear of unearthing something unholy in the empty heart of our coerced coexistence.

Many who are drawn to philosophy become toxic to the majority. They drink deep the dizzying wine of scepticism, question the basic empiricism necessary for life, and end up absorbing and transmitting radical relativism and subjectivism. They cry out that there is no such thing as truth, thereby proclaiming that there is no such thing as philosophy – all spoken under the guise of philosophy.

Most of us have every rational reason to avoid, fear and deny the pursuit of truth, since it so often leads us with great momentum to the crumbling edge of a foggy cliff.

There is great danger in the study of philosophy.

It can feel like summoning a demon you can barely hope to control.

A shallow study of philosophy is like a child’s first brush with science. As a child, when I first learned that the sun would eventually burn itself out, and that I was living on the side of a giant spinning ball on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, I felt depressed and disoriented. In the childhood of our species, when man believed he was the centre of the universe, it gave him comfort.

As a toddler, my daughter confidently told me that the lead hero in a movie could not die, because he was the centre of the story. Moving mankind from the centre of the universe to the inconsequential periphery can be extraordinarily disorienting. But it does give us the capacity to navigate the globe, predict the path of the planets, fly between continents and get to the moon and back.

It seems like a reasonable trade-off.

When I was younger, I had a lengthy recurring dream. The dreamscape would span the entire length of a semester – or even a whole school year – at university. Here’s how it went.

At the beginning of a semester, I sign up for an obscure class in an out-of-the-way building.

Then – I simply don’t go to class. I have strong intentions of going, so I don’t drop the course – but I just never seem to get around to showing up.

I forget the time and place of the course. I know I have it written down somewhere – and know I should dig up the information, attend the class, and get caught up on the course material. However, as the semester wears on, the growing backlog of work and the effort it would take to get caught up swells to the point where I avoid even looking up the class location, preferring to attend more enjoyable classes, play Frisbee in the quad, go on a romantic date, or – well, do anything but confront how far into the hole I have actually sunk.

Over the course of the dream, I feel a growing sense of unease, knowing I am being irresponsible by avoiding something essential. I continually kick myself, when my anxiety spikes, for not dropping the course when I had the chance, before it became too late, because now the bad mark will show up on my transcript no matter what.

This avoidance grows to the point where I have trouble enjoying anything, and I feel at war with myself.

Later in the semester, I become petty and easily annoyed. I view the anxiety that is trying to help me as an enemy. Oh come on, I tell it, there’s nothing to be done now! Why are you interfering with my enjoyment?

We all have this temptation, right? We all know we need to examine truth, morality, virtue, good and evil – and compare our examinations to our existing life, the lives of those around us, and our societies as a whole. But so often we prefer to coast, to avoid, to resent the nagging feeling that we are drifting further and further away from where we ought to be – as people, as families, as communities, as nations, as a species.

Instead, we think, Let me enjoy myself now, and the future will sort itself out somehow…

We believe anxiety is a form of instability. And we want to stay stable, no matter the cost to our personal and collective futures. We busy ourselves with alcohol, drugs, video games, exercise, vanity, spending. We deploy every form of stimulant to distract ourselves from difficult but necessary wisdom.

This book will bring you that wisdom. It will not make you crazy – I guarantee you that.

If you listen, this book will make you painfully sane. We have drifted so far from sanity that reality now scalds us – but we have no other choice, other than non-existence.

We have become so lost that we fear maps, but maps are all that can save us.

It is not too late as yet – but almost, almost.

Let us begin.

What Is Philosophy?

Philosophy is the study of truth, which is a definition that raises almost as many questions as it answers.

What is truth? How is truth differentiated from falsehood? Why is truth even preferable to falsehood?

Truth is the accurate identification of facts and principles in objective reality.

Our senses are our mind’s only windows to objective reality. Our brain, our consciousness, is encased in a bony skull prison. It cannot send out tentacles or mind rays to map whatever exists outside the inside of our heads. It must rely on information received and transmitted by the five senses.

As we grow, we create mental maps, based upon on our reception of sense data. When we feel the wind on our face, the treetops also move. When it rains, it is typically cloudy. When it is sunny, we feel warmer. We cannot breathe underwater, nor generally jump higher than half our height. When we run, we get short of breath, it hurts when we do belly flops, and mosquitoes are not our friends. Ladybugs are cute, but bees can be dangerous. An excess of courage often leads to injury, while an excess of cowardice leads to mockery and self-contempt.

In childhood, we build maps not just of empirical reality, but of social reality as well. People of different personality types constantly goad or encourage us to become more like them, or they prod others to satisfy their emotional requirements. The shy kids want us to restrain ourselves, while the outgoing kids mock our restraint. The fearful kids mock our courage, while the overconfident kids both help and endanger us by egging us on. The moral kids condemn our rule-breaking – the nihilistic kids mock rules. The nerds mock the jocks – the jocks roll their eyes at the nerds. The pretty kids don’t eat, the fat kids learn the arcane rules of even more arcane games – the homely kids learn how to make jokes. The kids who don’t take drugs scorn those who do, the kids who don’t have sex scorn those who do, and vice versa, of course.

Perceptive children quickly understand that society is an ecosystem of warring personalities and mental structures – not just horizontally, but vertically as well. The teachers, the curriculum, the entire educational structure attempts to impose a certain mindset upon the children. Many succumb without question, while others push back as much as they dare, often hopelessly and helplessly – or they withdraw completely, ghosting through the painted brick hallways.

The children are constantly commanded to be moral, but morality is never defined in a way that captures immorality on the part of their elders. Ethics become like an inverted fishing net that only catches the minnows, while letting the sharks swim free. We can further imagine a legal system that punishes a sailor taking a photograph in a submarine, while excusing a powerful woman who bypasses required security by setting up a home-brewed server in a barn.

When children blurt out an uncomfortable truth, they are told that “keeping quiet” is moral. When adults want information from kids, “speaking up” becomes moral.

Children are told not to use force to get their way, but they are typically spanked at home and punished in school. Children are told to respect the property of others, by teachers who use the power of the state to compel parents to pay their salaries through property taxes. Children are told to save their money, to avoid frivolous debt, and to be responsible – only to be justly shocked when they learn about the trillions of dollars in national debts that governments take out in their names. Children are told they have free will and that they are responsible for their choices, but they are generally compelled to go to school and to obey the commandments of their teachers.

Children are constantly told they owe society allegiance, because society really cares about the well-being of children. They’re told that all the harshness heaped upon them arises out of that concern for their young and tender well-being. As they age, however, the children find out they will be taxed for decades to pay for old-age pensions that they themselves have no chance of receiving. Their elders voted for government benefits, but not for the tax increases necessary to pay for those benefits, resulting in catastrophic debt and unfunded liabilities.

Children are told not to harm others, while many boys have a third of the skin of their penises sliced off shortly after birth, without anesthetic, for no medical necessity.

Among the more intelligent children, a suspicion begins to arise that moral rules are a form of psychological control, rather than universal absolutes that everyone must follow. When children begin to read the news and discover that those in power regularly get away with atrocities a thousand times worse than anything any child could imagine, this suspicion expands exponentially.

The pursuit of truth and the advocacy of truly universal moral rules quickly become a dangerous occupation when pseudo-philosophy is used as a weapon to subjugate society to the whims of the powerful. If your response to the question, “What is truth?” is not, “What your elders tell you,” then you may soon find your elders can rapidly turn on you.

When societies are growing and expanding, at least it’s a highly profitable subjugation to submit to the dictates of one’s elders. Obey social norms, get a good job, raise a family, save for your retirement, live well. However, when societies begin to contract and fail, elders rapidly lose the power of economic bribery necessary to control the youth.

The young graduate under a mountain of student debt and face dim or non-existent job prospects. They realize that criminal bankers get debt forgiveness, but young people cannot discharge their student debt even through bankruptcy. Then the young can no longer be bribed and social norms begin to fall apart. Seldom do a criminal enterprise or a pirate captain face mutiny when the gold is flowing in. Cold fingers close on hilts when victim ships are scarce.

To wipe away all these complications, all these confusions, all these manipulations from our mental maps of the world and its inhabitants requires an act of philosophy. It requires that we truly start from a blank page, with the innocence and ignorance of an infant, assuming that nothing is true, but that truth is possible. We must wilfully forget all we have learned – and especially all we have been taught – and view our existing histories, cultures, societies and beliefs as mere tangled rubble and undergrowth that need to be cleared away completely before we can start digging the foundations of a true and permanent home.

When you are walking and someone gives you bad directions, sending you in the wrong direction for hours, you get angry when you realize you’ve been misled. You did not start lost – you were made lost.

So it is with truth.

Bad ideas often lead to bad actions – and bad actions create the need for compounding lies to cover them up. Without philosophy, power and the resulting entropy reign supreme in the human mind and heart, and cultures continually fall away from reason, virtue and happiness.

Philosophy and Conformity

When we are children, rules continually come flying at us like a swarm of locusts, seemingly without end. We do not need philosophy in order to conform to the expectations of others – particularly if they hold power over us; that comes naturally. If virtue is obedience, our path to goodness is simple – find the authority figure with the most power to harm or reward us, and then merely conform to whatever that authority figure desires.

However, this choice rarely manifests so starkly. Authority figures do not like to present themselves as mere agents of physical strength, for the simple reason that they inevitably weaken with age.

A parent has an advantage of near-infinite size and power over the child – but as the child grows, the parent weakens. If physical size and strength alone determine who wins, the parent who dominates his child later ends up dominated by his adult child.

Concepts of “gods” and “virtues” were originally summoned to infuse authority figures with credibility over and above mere physical presence. A king is merely a man who can be easily slaughtered in his sleep, as Macbeth showed. However, if the king is infused with the divine right of monarchy, and is placed by an all-loving and all-powerful God to rule over a sinful mankind, then opposition to the king is opposition to God. You may kill the king, who can then no longer do you any more harm – but God will get the king’s revenge by robbing you of sleep and sending you to hell forever. Moral concepts were generally invented – or they evolved – to hide the aging mortality of merely empirical power relationships. “You are not obeying me,” says the king. “You are obeying God, who placed me to rule over you.”

You must obey the king, because he represents God. But the king himself does not have to obey God, because the king prays for instructions from God. And whatever the king does is informed by that mysterious and unverifiable interaction.

The chieftain represents the elders, or the world spirits, or the ghosts of champions. Such representation infuses him with an authority that transcends his mere mortal and physical presence. Totalitarianism is a dungeon patrolled by ghosts, however; banish those ghosts, and the dungeon breaks wide open.

It is impossible to avoid philosophy, even if one only wishes to pursue conformity to authority. What constitutes authority? Why and when is authority valid? How should we respond to an authority that contradicts itself, or acts against the moral values it imposes on its subjects?

We can say that no irrational abstractions can legitimize authority – that authority is merely the power to punish and reward, usually through force. We can say to ourselves that we have no respect for our teachers, for example, but we recognize their ability to pass or fail us. We can say to ourselves that we have no respect for tyrannical laws, but we recognize the judge’s ability to punish us. This perspective may trigger conformity to rules, but we will not internalize those rules as ideal standards. Ruling us profitably will be impossible, since we refuse to rule ourselves, and we are eager to break whatever fake rules we safely can.

There is an old saying that morality is whatever we do when no one is watching. This is not a philosophical argument, but it is an interesting observation. Do you respect property rights because it is moral, or do you avoid stealing another’s property because you fear jail? In a situation of societal breakdown, such as after a natural disaster, would you loot because you no longer feared jail? When rules are not idealized and internalized, the cost of enforcing them becomes increasingly high – often to the point of unsustainability. If you wish to destroy a society, teach its citizens that rules are mere exercises of power.

A thief who approaches a house and hears a large dog barking inside will probably choose another house – not because he has a sudden attack of conscience, but because he fears a sudden attack of dog.

The fear of consequences – of punishment – is like a stream pouring down the side of a mountain. If the stream hits a big rock, it will part and the water will find another way down. If the stream hits a lake, or a dam, or a reservoir, its progress will stop. This is how the mind of an amoral man in pursuit of a goal works. If he runs into a guard dog, or a policeman, or an alarm system, then he will change his course – but he won’t give up his goal.

Traditional philosophy empowers to evil those who most need its guidance toward the good, while it appeals most to those who need the least guidance. If you care about being good, you will listen to morality, but you also already possess the essential virtue of empathy, so you will most likely be good anyway. If you don’t possess empathy, you can easily use traditional philosophy to manipulate those who do into serving your needs.

Conformity to authority cannot be universalized, however, and universality is the very essence of philosophy. If I conform to an authority, who does the authority conform to? Of course, some would say the authority conforms to God, or to the wishes of the ancestors, or to the world spirit, or to the will of the people. But even these cannot be universalized and are scarcely objectively measurable. Also, if one man can conform to God, and I am a man, then why can I not just conform to that God? Why do I need a secular authority to order me around? If every man needs another man to obey, then who does the ultimate authority figure obey?

This is the problem of infinite regression. We can abstract the concept of obedience to say that a citizen obeys something called “the law,” but the law either represents abstract moral virtues, or it is the mere will of the legislature. If the law represents abstract moral virtues, then I am not obeying the law. I am merely conforming to those virtues – which are superior to the law, and which render the law invalid if it deviates from the virtues.

Saying that the law is a mere shadow cast by the perfect statue of virtue severely curtails the will of the ruler, as King George found out during the American Revolution. If the moral law is Thou Shall Not Steal, then a government that steals – or legalizes its own act of theft – is acting against morality. And moral people would have no innate reason to obey it. In fact, their respect for property rights would instruct them to challenge the law, or perhaps even disobey it.

If the law represents the mere will of the legislature, then it has no foundational moral content to speak of. It is merely the compulsion used in the pursuit of power. This approach expands the will of the ruler – either in a democracy, or in a more authoritarian system – but contradicts his moral legitimacy. It exposes a coercive oligarchical hierarchy as a mere exercise of power – do it because I have more guns than you – which turns the enforcement of legality into a dangerous game of whack-a-mole, since citizens feel no universal moral obligation to obey the law. Thus they get away with whatever they can. This in turn triggers the rulers to raise the penalties for disobedience, which increases the costs of enforcement and inflames the cynicism of the population, leading to economic and social collapse.

Thus rulers need morality, but fear morality as well. It is like desperately needing a bodyguard, but being terrified that he will stab you in your sleep. If rulers can cloak their exercise of power in morality, then people will be more likely to obey them – but the innate universality of morality limits the power of the ruler. This tension will exist as long as governments exist, with the same inevitable outcome every time.

Philosophy and Reality

“Truth” describes verifiable and objective principles and experiences.

If I say that I had a headache last summer while camping alone, there is no way to verify my statement. But if I say that the sun is 8.3 light minutes away from the earth, there are ways to verify my statement.

Subjective experiences do not fall in the realm of philosophy, any more than nightly dreams fall in the realm of physics. Saying that something “feels true” makes about as much sense as saying that “imagination proves scientific hypotheses.”

The conflation of subjective experience with objective truth is one of the great curses of human history.

If I speak a truth that others find inconvenient or offensive, they imagine that their emotions somehow rebut the facts. The idea that being upset trumps examining objective facts is an example of just how far we have drifted from the tough-minded and empirical philosophy that founded our civilization.

In order to value truth, we must first establish the existence of an objective reality.

Its existence is easily testable. For instance, I have two realms of experience – one in which impossible things happen, and another in which impossible things do not happen. The first realm is my dreams – or perhaps a very vivid video game. The second is reality. I once had a startling dream wherein an alligator propelled itself backwards a distance of fifty or sixty feet, landing near me. This cannot happen in reality, absent the invention of reptilian jetpacks.

Impossibility is a hallmark of subjectivity. Fantasy novels contain magic, and magic is defined as mental effects on nature that cannot be explained or achieved in reality. I can buy a Taser, if I want, but I cannot shoot lightning bolts from my fingertips, Dungeons & Dragons style. I cannot cast a sleep spell, but I can shoot a tranquilizer dart.

I cannot move forward by pushing a W key, which is one reason I know that my computer monitor is different from my eyeballs.

Impossibility is at least partly defined as “objects or processes with self-contradictory definitions” – a square circle, for instance. It is impossible for matter to both attract and repel other matter simultaneously, for a gas to both expand and contract when heated, for the world to be both flat and spherical, or for objects to be moving closer together and further apart at the same time.

Thus, there are two realms of experience – the realm of impossibility and self-contradiction or the realm of possibility. In one realm – the dream realm – there are no consistent laws of physics or identity. Objects and entities have a variety of properties that change all the time, but we usually wake up in the same bed we fell asleep in. If I am curious, I can hook up a video camera to record myself sleeping, and then compare my subjective experience of dreaming to my objective experience of lying in a bed. I may dream that I am flying, but when I observe myself, I see I am only twitching under the covers.

There is also an intermediate realm – which can be confusing for some, but which is easy to explain philosophically – and that is the realm of manipulation.

Let’s say your friend Bob is lying on the couch, and he really wants a peach from a tree in the garden. Bob can ask you to go pick one for him, and perhaps you will. Or Bob can beg, wheedle, bribe, cajole, bully or manipulate you into getting him a peach, and perhaps you will. But he only tries because you’re human. There is no other living entity in the universe that we know of that Bob can manipulate into getting him a peach. He can manipulate other human beings; he cannot manipulate peach trees or physics or gravity.

If I have to jump from a high wall, I can beg you to catch me. I cannot rationally beg gravity to suspend itself, even for an instant. If I’m lying in a sunny hammock, I can ask you to get me sunscreen. I cannot ask the sun to refrain from burning me – or, if I do, the sun will not obey.

If you have a job or hobby that involves manipulating and controlling people, then you spend a lot of time in a fairly subjective frame of mind. Please understand, I am not saying that manipulating and controlling people is innately bad. It can have very positive outcomes, such as your doctor scaring you into losing weight and exercising, or a salesman helping you overcome your fearful resistance to a beneficial purchase.

If you are in sales, politics, the media, or academia, then your primary focus is not on objective reality, but on other people’s minds – their perceptions and thoughts and feelings. If you wheedle, cajole, bully, manipulate, encourage and inspire, then you are like a farmer whose primary crop is future human actions. Of course, the hope is that you bring objective principles to people’s subjective experience, with the goal of helping them make rational decisions – but often, of course, this is scarcely the case. If you are in academia, you might bring to people’s pre-existing prejudices the facts that deny the sexism of the supposed male/female “wage gap.” Or you might stoke those prejudices and provoke the plethora of resentments, alienations, and frustrations that lead people to bitter, barren lives.

Those who spend significant amounts of time attempting to influence other people’s thoughts and actions are often in grave danger of falling prey to the “subjective universe” hypothesis – which is one reason it spreads so rapidly. Since most of their mental energies are spent trying to change other people’s minds, the objectivity of the universe easily becomes obscured.

When I was a kid, spoon bending, telekinesis and all other sorts of mental gibberish were enormously popular. And I remember, open-minded young tyke that I was, experimenting with controlling objects through my mind. My very first music LP was “The Things We Do for Love,” by 10cc. Back in the day, you had to put a needle on the record to play it, and when the song was over, the needle would just keep clicking against the label. I clearly remember, at about the age of eleven, lying on my bed, listening to the music playing in another room, and working my mind feverishly to lift the needle and put it back in its holder.

I tried a number of other approaches to this hypothesis that telekinesis could work, all of which failed completely.

Another time, my mother took me to a spoon-bending class, where I was supposed to be taught how to bend spoons with my mind. This turned out to be mere mental manipulation combined with continually rubbing the metal of the spoon to make it softer. You then imagined yourself easily twisting the spoon. By the time you actually twisted it, the metal was softer, and you were mentally psyched up to more easily do it.

I also got interested in mind reading, UFOs, pyramid power, and all other sorts of mental detritus that clogged up the brainpower of the late 1970s – but none of it ever panned out.

In hindsight, I’m sort of glad that this nonsense was everywhere – and I’m very glad that I gave it all an honest try. Because it taught me two important things: first of all, empirical verification is the key to truth. And second, society seems more than willing to regularly swan-dive into sophisticated vats of utter mental garbage.

Moving objects with your mind violates basic laws of physics. It is an effect without a cause – in other words, movement without prior movement. And it also denies basic evolution – in that if we could move things with our minds, we would scarcely have developed arms and hands. It’s the same with telepathy. Any human group with the capacity to transmit thoughts would have had such an enormous evolutionary advantage that such a skill would have spread like wildfire among the population. (Imagine the advantage in war and hunting alone.)

Similarly, our emotions are good at helping us read people, but not as good at helping us understand objective reality. Throughout history, human predators were our greatest danger. And they live among us in the greatest disguise of all, since they often look just like us or people we love. Those who developed strong and accurate “gut instincts” about dangerous people avoided – or at least minimized – such predations.

As we became more civilized and lived in towns and cities, non-human predation fell away. And so people tended to focus their fight-and-flight mechanisms on dangerous people, rather than on predatory animals. These dangerous people, in turn, developed language skills designed to blunt people’s capacity to sniff out human danger.

Lions creep in the tall grass, and human predators hide in baffling and manipulative syllables. Rational philosophers bring truth and pain now, but freedom later. Sophists bring ease and relief now, but tyranny later. The human herd vacillates from greed to necessity and back again, like a weak man torn between a good wife and a dangerous mistress.

These days, we live in such a social world that we tend to confuse our instincts about people with facts about reality.

Philosophy and Control

If you hold a toy airplane, you can maneuver it to fly directly. If you fly it through remote control, you can maneuver it indirectly. If your friend flies it through remote control, you can tell him to turn the plane left or right. If you watch an old video of a toy airplane flying, you cannot control it at all.

We inhabit several layers of diminishing control – the first is over our own mind, our own thoughts. Our thoughts are largely autonomous, but subject to our control. If I ask you to think of an eagle, you can think of an eagle. It is unlikely you will continue to think of one for long, since the human mind is self-generating, absent-minded and easily distracted. Something more important will soon grab your attention.

This type of mind control has limits. If I tell you not to think of an eagle, is it even possible for you to do as I ask?

Thoughts within us are constantly churning, arriving, disappearing. Our minds are beehives of continual activity. They initiate internal action constantly, and equally constantly, they remain in motion. Controlling thoughts is initially like trying to ride a barely trained horse – but it is the most direct layer of control that we have. Our bodies can be externally controlled – we can be handcuffed, for instance. Our minds cannot be so directly controlled.

The second layer of control is over our own bodies. I can tell my right hand to scratch my eyebrow and it will obey. I can manage my own thoughts, and I can initiate actions in my body – at least in my limbs and external body. I can’t do much to control my digestion or blood flow, nor can I stop my heart with my mind.

I can stop my arms from moving. I cannot stop myself from aging.

My mind is in constant motion. The aspects of my body I can control tend to be inert. My arm does not move until I tell it to. We manage our minds, while we move our bodies.

The first level of control is over our own minds; the second is over our own bodies.

The third layer of control is over objects we can manipulate beyond our own bodies. I can pick up a peach and eat it – I cannot blow a cumulus cloud away.

Other people can also pick up that peach; they cannot directly control my arm.

After this, our control trails away quickly. I can choose to drink a glass of water; I cannot decide water is poisonous to me. I can choose to crank up a Queen song on my headphones; I cannot choose whether high volume damages my hearing. I can choose to drink arsenic; I cannot will it to be good for me.

We can control our own thoughts to some degree, we can control our own bodies to some degree, and we can manipulate proximate entities, but we cannot change physical laws or properties at will.

That which we cannot choose to change falls under the definition of what we call objective or external reality.

Science generally measures what we cannot choose to change, as does engineering, logic, mathematics and other objective disciplines. If an engineer builds a bridge, and that bridge falls down, no one blames the engineer’s willpower or sartorial preferences. He may have made a mistake in his calculations, or the materials may have been defective, or some extremity of weather may have overtaken the parameters of his design – but his will is not what is at fault.

On the other hand, if I ask you to hold my delicate computer tablet and you drop it in excitement when your phone rings, clearly you have been deficient in some manner of concentration, focus or willpower. You certainly had the strength to hold my little tablet, but you got distracted and excited, and dropped it. You had the power to hold the tablet, and therefore you own your failure to do so.

If I get a sunburn, I am irrational if I blame the sun. Rather, the fault lies with my own lack of preparation. I can alter whether I put on sunscreen, and I can alter whether I stay in the shade. I cannot change whether the sun produces ultraviolet rays, or the effects those rays have on my skin.

That which we cannot change is the foundation of objective reality.

The challenge is that the human brain exists within objective reality, but the mind is changeable. We will get to more on this later.

To summarize the four levels of control – we have the mind, which controls itself. We have the body, which is to some degree controlled by the mind because the body references the brain. We have manipulatable objects, which cannot be directly controlled – unlike the body – but which can be controlled by the body secondhand, so to speak.

The fourth level is where we have zero control – and this is where we find objective, empirical, uncontrollable reality.

You may disagree with me that the fourth level is the foundation of objective reality, but you cannot disagree with the definition. You can think of an elephant in your mind – you cannot magically summon an elephant to appear in reality. When you think of a peach, your mouth may water – but you cannot eat one without finding some way to put an actual peach in your mouth. You can control your thoughts, you can initiate movement in your hand, you can pick a peach, but you cannot alter physical laws, gravity or the properties of atoms.

There is an old saying, which applies as much to engineering as to science: Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. This is the foundation of objective philosophy, of the fourth level of control, or lack of control.

In order to build a bridge, you must accept the properties of nature that are beyond your control. You can build a stronger bridge; you cannot diminish gravity. You can build a bridge that opens; you cannot build a bridge that disappears and reappears at the push of a button. You can build a glass-bottomed boat, but you cannot build a boat with no bottom or top and expect it to float.

These metaphysical differences are how we begin to differentiate between our minds and our bodies – that which we can control, and that which we cannot control.

We can think of these layers as an inverted pyramid of prevalence. We have absolutely no control over most of the universe. We cannot will the galaxy of Andromeda to change its course. Just about everything is made of hydrogen, and just about everything lies beyond our control. Only a tiny subsection of that which exists is within our control. Everything that exists could theoretically be controlled, but that which we can actually affect is but a tiny subsection of all that is.

Think of yourself. Most of the universe is beyond your control, including all of its laws and most of its properties, but you can affect a tiny minority of objects and properties within your direct sphere of control.

Think of your body. Billions of people live in the world, but no one except you can directly will your right hand to scratch your eyebrow.

Only you have direct physical control over your own body. Someone else can force you to do something, but they cannot directly control your body in the same way that you can. Stealing a car does not transfer its rightful ownership; forcing your body does not transfer your natural will.

Your mind – which is really you, more or less – is not only under your control, it is the very source of the control that you exercise over your body and over the objects in your vicinity that you can control.

Imagine you are walking by a road in flip-flops, and you stub your toe hard on a broken piece of sidewalk. You cry out in pain, bend over, rub your toe and check for damage. If asked, you would surely say that stubbing your toe was a negative event.

Suddenly, a bus comes careening off the road and crashes onto the sidewalk just a few feet in front of you.

Immediately, your perspective on the entire sequence changes. The broken piece of sidewalk, formerly your enemy, now becomes your salvation. Stubbing your toe, formerly a negative event, now becomes a wonderful, life-saving happenstance.

Nothing has changed in reality, of course. You did stub your toe, it did cause pain, and the bus did crash up onto the sidewalk. But your perspective on the sequence of events has altered enormously.

Your mind can change; this does not change reality. But events in reality can change everything within your mind.

Your mind can be ambivalent – you can have two opposing opinions about an idea or argument – but you cannot move your arm in two opposing directions at once. You cannot go north and south at the same time. However, you can be both happy and sad at the same time. We cannot categorize these capacities as identical.

Here is how we can begin to establish the existence of an external, objective reality.

Once we understand that there are things we can alter directly, things we can alter indirectly, and things that we cannot alter, then we truly begin to understand how the foundation for an acceptance of objective reality begins to take shape.

Radical Scepticism

It is possible to construct a scenario wherein all the above divisions still remain within our own mind. Perhaps we are just a brain in a tank, manipulated by a Cartesian demon who externally divides our mind and experiences into the multiple categories defined above. If our mind exists in some sort of virtual reality, then there’s no reason why this demon could not provide us stimuli we could change, and stimuli we could not change.

In a video game, you can move your character around an environment, but you typically cannot change the physics of that environment. However, both the movements (what you can change) and the physics (what you cannot change) are equally products of the designers and programmers of the game. For instance, they have programmed it so you are unable to redesign your environment; only their decision results in an unchangeable environment as you play.

To think of it another way, if you are directing a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you are generally not allowed or encouraged to alter the text. Fidelity to Shakespeare’s source material requires that the actors memorize and repeat the Bard’s words. You can change the staging, the environment, the costumes, even cut some scenes – but you are not supposed to alter the language itself. However, this is merely a convention of the theatre. There is no absolute reason why you cannot monkey around with the text as much as you want. Shakespeare chose the words he put down, and convention encourages us to follow them, but there is nothing absolute in any of those decisions.

If you are directing a more contemporary play, the playwright might not allow you to change the text at all.

Exorcising the Cartesian Demon

Can we escape this logical possibility of being nothing more than an externally controlled brain?

While it is possible to examine any number of scenarios that could support the “brain in a tank” hypothesis, it is also fairly easy to push back against this proposal to the point where it topples right over.

To begin, we must examine the standard of the “null hypothesis.”

If you have a hypothesis that cannot possibly be disproved, then you have added nothing whatsoever to the sum total of knowledge, truth, understanding or perception – or to anything, for that matter. If I say that I have an invisible friend named Bob, and then steadfastly reject and refuse any standards or criteria by which the existence of Bob can be established, what am I doing except wasting everyone’s time? (Often, annoyingly, that is precisely the point.)

Another way of approaching this problem is to remember that anything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

There is a kind of intellectual black hole that fools and trolls deploy to entrap the unwary. They propose a ridiculous hypothesis, and then deny all attempts to disprove it. I remember a young man once putting forward the thesis that the Soviet wall in Berlin was actually designed to keep Westerners out of the paradise of East Berlin. His mother and I railed against this hypothesis, but of course the goalpost kept moving, and nothing could ever be established with any certainty. If we peered over the wall and saw a dingy dystopia, well that was just a hallucination projected by the benevolent rulers of the communist paradise. When we pointed out to the young man that the machine guns were pointed inwards, he said this was just to make it look bad, so people would not break down the wall trying to break into the utopia, and so on.

Arguing with fools is not always a completely useless exercise, but taken to extremes and applied consistently, all it produces among the intelligent is intellectual paralysis and self-destroying radical scepticism, which again is often the point.

Remember: If a hypothesis cannot possibly be disproved, it can be irrefutably dismissed.

The reason is that a truth proposition must be compared to something in order to find out whether it is true or not. Truth cannot be entirely self-referential. Otherwise, it cannot be the truth at all. Truth is a standard that we apply to propositions that reference something other than their own principles or arguments. For instance, if I say there are two bananas on the table, is that a true statement? Well, if a pair of bananas is sitting on the table, then yes. If there is only one banana, or no bananas, or three mangoes and an elephant – then it is a false statement.

If you are not allowed to look at the table, is my statement true or false? It cannot be verified, so it doesn’t matter.

If I say that I dreamt about two bananas last night, however, there is no way to objectively verify my statement. You may believe me, if you think I am an honest person, but it cannot be established as “true” in any rational or empirical fashion.

Personal, subjective statements are not part of philosophy, any more than they are part of science or math. It is not mathematics to say that you like the shape of the symbol for the number two.

If I say that a coconut was spontaneously created and simultaneously destroyed on the far side of the Andromeda Galaxy twelve million years ago, will you say that the statement is true? Will you say that it is false? I would lean towards “false,” for the simple reason that matter cannot be created and destroyed, and coconuts generally don’t exist in a vacuum. But who really cares? No proof is possible, no disproof is necessary, and the statement has no relevance to anything whatsoever.

I would also need to explain how I know about the mysterious coconut in the first place. If I cannot explain how it was proved to me, how can I expect other people to believe me?

An important standard in philosophy goes something like this: “WHO CARES?”

If a proposition has no practical value or benefit, changes no particular behaviour, or cannot be disproved, then we can definitively file it under the category of, well, who cares?

Philosophy is like medicine. In general, doctors should study the most dangerous and prevalent diseases, since human desires for health are infinite, while medical resources are most definitely finite. Sure, you could write a proposal for grant money in order to study the possibility that once every thousand years, someone may get dizzy from biting their thumbnail, but who cares?

When evaluating a philosophical hypothesis, one essential question is: What behaviour might change if people accept this viewpoint?

If I convince you that honesty is a virtue that would bring you love and happiness, then I certainly hope you would begin to tell the truth more often. If you accept the argument that courage is necessary for virtue, and virtue is necessary for happiness, then if you want happiness, presumably you will try to be more courageous.

An argument that cannot be disproved can be dismissed – this is our first salvo against the idea that all reality is subjective.

I prefer victory to stalemate, however, so let us destroy the argument once and for all.

The “Infinite Simulation” Hypothesis

What if we lived in a simulation so perfect and complete that it was indistinguishable from the common-sense perspective that we live in an objective and empirical reality? This could be called an infinite simulation.

Theinfinite simulation hypothesis generally denies and defies any disproof, so it can have no rational change upon a person’s behaviour. If believing in this hypothesis resulted in the ability to go without food and air – since our requirement for both is a mere illusion – then this would lend support and value to the hypothesis. However, anyone who believes in such a hypothesis still has to breathe and eat, so nothing changes there.

As you pursue the infinite simulation hypothesis, you will find no practical difference between accepting the hypothesis and rejecting it. In other words, no requirements, standards or necessities change if you believe you are living in a simulation, versus living in objective reality.

It is reasonable to ask, “What changes if I accept this assertion?” If the answer is, “Nothing really,” then surely more important things need to be done.

Naturally – and logically – this does not automatically disprove the hypothesis, but it does bring to light the question of whether it is important at all.

Another approach is needed to disprove the hypothesis.

The question of infinite regression is important here.

If you think of the concept of biological evolution, it cannot be arbitrarily cut off after a certain number of generations. If evolution is a valid hypothesis, then it must extend all the way back to the origins of life itself. One central aspect to the theory of evolution is that no gods are needed for the development and progression of life. It would have done Charles Darwin little good to say that evolution was a universal principle that went back 5,000 years – but before that, life required a god. (In fact, this would have put him squarely in line with most theologians, who fully recognize local adaptations to species – such as the domestication of wild animals for human purposes – but who believe that the beginning of life required God.)

The underlying axiom of the infinite simulationhypothesis is that consciousness inhabits a simulation imposed from outside. Now, this simulation cannot be autonomous in and of itself, but rather must be imposed by another consciousness, which exists outside our own.

The existence of a prisoner implies the existence of an imprisoner. If you have been hypnotized, this implies the existence of a hypnotist.

If you exist in an infinite simulation, then someone or something must be imposing that simulation upon you. Think of putting on a virtual reality mask. Someone created the mask, someone created the program you’d view, and so on. The existence of virtual reality presupposes the existence of at least one other consciousness that encases you in that virtual reality. If you are locked in a basement, someone made the basement and locked you in.

Do you see the problem yet?

If consciousness exists within virtual reality, then all conscious beings must exist within virtual reality. This is inescapable. If you are a brain in a tank, then someone grew your brain in the tank, attached the electrodes that give you the simulation of experience, and supplied the necessary energy and stimulation.

Furthermore, in your waking illusion, you continually interact with people smarter and more experienced than yourself, and read books supposedly written thousands of years ago – some in other languages – so you must be consuming the products of other consciousnesses.

Let’s call you “Bob,” and let’s call the super being who controls your experience “Lord Doug.”

For some unfathomable reasons of his own, Lord Doug grows a human brain called Bob, puts it in a tank, attaches electrodes, and supplies Bob with an “external, objective reality,” as well as an “internal, subjective experience.”

I’m sure you see the problem by now. If the argument is that Bob is in aninfinite simulation, then why does the argument not equally apply that Lord Doug is also in an infinite simulation? If consciousness exists within a perfect simulation, then Lord Doug must also exist in a perfect simulation, since Lord Doug possesses consciousness.

Lord Doug’s infinite simulation experience also requires an external consciousness that applies this simulation. Let’s call this other consciousness “Sir Jim.” Naturally, Sir Jim also exists in a simulation, which requires an external consciousness to… Well, you get the idea. The problem of infinite regression destroys the validity of the hypothesis.

If all consciousness exists in an infinite simulation, and consciousness is required to create an infinite simulation, then there can be no logical end to the upward progression of infinite simulations… Mind A is wrapped in an infinite simulation by Mind B; Mind B is wrapped in an infinite simulation by Mind C, and so on.

You can, of course, say that Sir Jim exists in the “ultimate reality,” beyond which no creator of the simulation is required, because Sir Jim does not exist in a simulation.

By doing this, you have accepted that consciousness can exist in an objective reality. If this is true for Jim, then why is it not true for Doug or Bob – or for yourself?

By inventing Doug and Jim, all you have done is add additional useless layers of complexity and unbelievability – without even the intellectual integrity of a null hypothesis – to the simple statement that consciousness exists in objective reality.

Also, since your simulated reality includes the contents and productions – books, movies and conversations – of billions of other minds, then the simulation cannot possibly be the product of one single mind. Those who advance this theory may try to get around this problem by claiming that the manufacturer of the simulated reality is omniscient. But appeals to magical non-restrictions are not an argument. The label “omniscient” is not a concept, but an anti-concept. All consciousness is limited. Removing limitations removes the very definition of consciousness. Likewise, all life is mortal. The word “immortal” is not a concept, but an anti-concept, since it simply removes one of the definitions and restrictions of life itself. A house is a house, not the destruction of a house. A concept is a concept, not the destruction of a concept.

Also, we generally accept that knowing everything would include knowing everything about morality. Omniscience, by definition, would involve some relationship to virtue, and in particular to empathy, since an all-knowing being would know exactly how much pain immoral actions would cause others. Therefore, an omniscient being would also be perfectly moral, which would mean: unwilling to lie. However, since a “simulated reality” is a metaphysical falsehood inflicted upon a helpless and unaware victim, it is the worst conceivable lie and manipulation. Omniscience would thus equal terrifying and demonic sadism, which would also mean that increases in knowledge would be increases in evil. An increase in empathy would be an increase in sadism, and greater knowledge would provoke greater immorality.

If someone advances such a theory to you, he is clearly trying to increase your knowledge. However, since the theory requires an omniscient being to be utterly evil, he is arguing that increasing knowledge increases evil, and so you can reject him on the grounds that he is trying to make you more evil by giving you more knowledge.

If he replies that more knowledge does not make you more evil, then he cannot claim that your consciousness is manipulated by an infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely sadistic being.

If he replies that more knowledge makes you more virtuous, then he cannot claim that your consciousness is manipulated by an infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely sadistic being, since infinite knowledge implies infinite virtue, and lying to innocent victims is not virtuous.

Also, there is the general problem of why an omniscient being would bother creating such a ridiculous laboratory. Why would it spend its entire energies and efforts manipulating one mortal creature? If the omniscient being is virtuous, it would never create such a lie. If the omniscient being is evil, despite all the contradictions outlined above, how could it possibly profit from creating such a delusion? Certainly there could be no material profit; the only profit could be watching suffering. However, if the omniscient being has created the simulation for the sole purpose of taking sadistic pleasure in watching suffering, then why do so much joy and pleasure exist within the simulation? Why are there love and sex and the thrill of victory?

None of it makes any sense, of course.

Even if we bypass the problems of omniscience, virtue and motive, we still face the problem of infinite regression in causality.

If you say that all consciousnesses live in a simulated reality controlled by an external consciousness, then you have not solved the problem of causality. If every consciousness is manipulated by an external outsider, then no one is causing anything. Everyone is just bouncing off the random stimuli provided by their external mental jailer. Who, then, decided to set all of these events and experiments in motion? It’s like the argument that says, if consciousness exists, it must have been created. Whoever created the consciousness also has a consciousness and therefore must have been created. This is the problem of infinite regression, and it cannot be solved by ignoring it (although that is often attempted).

If consciousness can exist in objective reality, then the simplest and most rational explanation is that your consciousness exists in objective reality. You don’t even need the principle of Occam’s razor – that the simplest explanation is usually the best – just some basic common sense.

If you accept that consciousness can exist in objective reality, then you don’t need non-falsifiable pseudo-explanations of additional layers of manipulated unreality and hidden external consciousnesses, and so on.

You either face the problem of infinite regression – meaning infinite universes, infinite energy, and no original causality whatsoever – or you accept that we do not exist in a simulation.

We exist in objective reality – you and I, and everyone else – and that is all there is to it.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to mess with your head, inject you with crazy talk, and possibly ruin your life.

Argue back, try to save them – and if they steadfastly resist, run for your very life!

Validating the Senses

One reason why theinfinite simulation hypothesis is so seductive is because there is an element of truth in the formulation. We are brains in a tank – the “tank” is just our skull. Our minds have no direct contact with the empirical reality external to our brains.

When we really think about this, it’s easy to start feeling weird. Everything we perceive is at least second hand. Our brain cannot squeeze itself out our nose and vacation in the land of objective reality, like a jellyfish feeling up a tree. Everything we perceive about reality is delivered to us through the senses – and the emotions, of course.

If you lived in a cave, without a clock, how long would it take you to lose track of day and night? After a couple weeks, how much would you be willing to bet whether it was day or night? If you are one of those lucky people with a strict biological clock of diurnal schedules, going to bed and waking up at about the same time, you would have a pretty good idea. But for most of us, our sleep would drift to the point where we wouldn’t have any idea whether we were sleeping during day or night.

Imagine being born blind in a village of sightless people, isolated from the world. Imagine all the things you wouldn’t know about. You wouldn’t know about the moon or the stars; you wouldn’t know what a distant mountaintop looked like – or even that it existed. You may not have any clear idea what the tops of trees looked like, and would have no idea about the structure of clouds. You would notice that it rained sometimes, but you wouldn’t know anything visual about high stratospheric cloud formations. You would (hopefully) never experience meteors. And the occasional airplane flying high above may only register with your ears, not your eyes.

This list could go on and on, but the point is to recognize how many of our concepts require the evidence of the senses. If you were deaf, but not blind, you would look at a distant airplane and have no idea whether it made sound or not. Since the flight of high-flying birds is inaudible, perhaps the same would be true of airplanes as well. How would you know?

Most of what goes on in our mind is derived from electrical impulses delivered by the senses. “Reality” is a consistent electrical storm imprinted on our minds by nerve endings in our bodies. In a sense, we are like a king locked in a castle with no windows, who learns about his kingdom only through a constant stream of messengers entering his prison through secret doors.

The mind generally receives – it does not transmit. Centuries ago, some thinkers argued that the eyes sent out rays or beams, like radar, and received visual echolocation back. However, our eyes only receive; they do not transmit. We can reach with our hands to manipulate reality, but our senses operate as inputs only. Our ears also only receive. We can receive sensations through our skin – we cannot send sensations through our skin.

Naturally, a central question of epistemology – the study of knowledge – is whether the information we receive from our senses is valid.

Now “valid” is just another word for “accurate” or “true,” which brings us back to the basic question – what is truth?

As discussed before, “truth” is a statement about objective reality that conforms with the nature and principles of objective reality. If I say that there is a cloud overhead, my statement is true if there is in fact a cloud overhead.

This requirement for objective reality as a standard of truth can be challenging for some who believe that their own internal states have a truth or falsehood about them.

It is true, for example, that I felt sad yesterday; it is true that I feel happy today. It is true that I love my wife, that I study the truth, and that I hate evil.

It is worth spending a few moments to deal with this question of internal states before moving on to the validity of the senses, because emotions are an essential aspect of how we effectively process and deal with reality.

Knowing you feel strongly about something is essential for focus and motivation – as long as you know that experiencing your feelings is not the same as knowing the truth. Wanting to diet is not the same as actually dieting – though it is an essential first step.

It is important to know when you are angry at someone – and it is equally important to know that your anger does not automatically make that person wrong or bad. In the modern world, emotions are often perceived as accurate judgements, a belief that unleashes a feral mob more often than not. Emotions are usually expressed as all-important accusations – but the conclusions drawn from them need to be proved in the court of reason before being accepted as valid. Philosophy without emotions is random and inconsequential; emotions without philosophy are wayward and destructive.

The question of “love” is fascinating. Emotions do not exist outside the body, in the objective external world. A man’s love for learning may cause him to build a school; the school certainly exists outside his body, but his love for learning does not. That feeling lives within him and dies with him, though the school survives him.

This is not to say that love is an entirely subjective state. As was established in my earlier book, Real-Time Relationships: The Logic of Love, what we call “love” is merely our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous.

The experience of love releases certain endorphins in the mind and body, which can be objectively measured. We have a subjective experience called “lust,” which also provokes measurable biological responses in our body. If a man says he is not sexually attracted to a certain image, but his body manifests an erection, we have reason to doubt his protestations.

Also, it is reasonable to accept that the emotion of love does not produce random behaviours in the person experiencing it. If I say that I love a restaurant, but never want to eat there, what does that mean? If I say that I love playing sports, but sit on the couch every spare minute I have, am I being honest? If I say that I love my wife, but divorce her for no particular reason, do my actions support my use of the world “love”?

Of course, we can always construct scenarios wherein I love a restaurant, but never want to eat there because it is too far away, too expensive, or I am allergic to the food. But assuming I have the means, motive and an opportunity to eat at a restaurant I claim to love, yet I never want to do it, something is wrong with my claim.

Remember, empirical evidence trumps conceptual hypotheses – every time.

If I say I love spending time with a particular friend, but I shudder and recoil every time he proposes a get-together, surely we understand that there is a contradiction between my claimed feelings and my measurable actions.

Think of two professional wrestlers engaged in a public trash-talking hate-fest, who are later seen amicably eating dinner together after a match, giggling and cleaning out the buffet. Would we say their hate is genuine, or that it is part of an entertaining show put on to sell tickets?

In other words, there are ways to objectively measure the empirical effects of subjective experiences. If love is claimed, but hatred or indifference is objectively measured, then it is reasonable to question the sincerity of the claim.

Our judgements should work the same way our bodies work. Our bodies process deeds, not words. If I want to lose weight, I can say the word “diet” over and over again while chewing my way through a cheesecake, but my body will only respond to what I eat, not what I say. Repeatedly yodeling the word “exercise” works little but my lungs. Actually going to the gym will affect my body.

If someone pulls out your fingernails, you experience pain. Perhaps you are a masochist who enjoys the feeling, but it is pain nonetheless. Its physiological effects can be objectively measured in your body.

Thus, while emotions are somewhat subjective, the effects of them can often be measured objectively.

On the Senses

Regarding our five senses, it is certainly true that each individual sense can be misinterpreted. This does not invalidate the senses as a whole.

There is a reason we evolved to have five senses, rather than just one or two. Judging reality via only one sense is like looking at 20 percent of the night sky and decisively determining whether the moon is out or not.

When you put a pencil into a glass of water, it looks disjointed. However, it is important to remember that our eyes do not provide us with conclusions, merely information. Our eyes do not inform us about the straightness of the pencil; they merely provide the light waves to our brain. Our sense of touch can tell us more. If we run our finger down the pencil, past the waterline, we can feel that it is not disjointed, and we realize that the water is merely bending the light waves where the surface meets the pencil.

Similarly, we may believe that a distant image of water in the desert is not a mirage, but a real lake. Our eyes do not tell us whether a lake exists in the distance; they merely transmit light waves to our brain. If we run forward through the blinding heat and find no actual lake, we understand that we have been subject to an illusion, which is another way of saying we came to the wrong conclusion about the evidence gleaned from only one sense – in this case, our eyesight. Our eyes are not to blame for the error, but our mind. Not the raw data, but our refined conclusions.

However, if we walk forward and find a lake that we can swim in and drink from, then we no longer have any reason to believe that the lake is a mirage – for the simple reason that all of our five senses confirm its existence – in other words, the consistent properties of a lake.

One of the reasons we have more than one sense is that it takes our senses acting in concert, reinforcing each other, to establish facts about objective reality.

We’ve all had the experience of walking through a room in the darkness and banging our shin on a table. We walk confidently, thinking we are avoiding obstacles, but our confidence is disproved by the sudden pain in our leg. Here, our eyes do not transmit any indication of the table, but our sense of touch – and of pain – gives us the truth.

There are three distinct classes of sense perception: the perception of absence, as in an open door; the perception of inconsistency, as in a mirage; and the perception of consistency, as in a lake.

In other words, things are either not there, they are perhaps there, or they are really there. When you look ahead in the desert, you see either sand, a mirage, or a lake. Sand is the absence of a lake, the mirage is the possibility of a lake, while the lake is the thing itself.

These perceptions – no impression on the senses, inconsistent impression on the senses, or consistent impression on the senses – are the differences between absence, illusion and presence.

When I look ahead on a hot road while driving, I can say that the road ahead is wet and full of puddles. But as I drive closer, they all disappear and no water sprays from the sides of my tires.

Because my original claim that the road ahead was wet did not match additional sense details – as I got closer, the “wetness” disappeared – my original hypothesis was false.

It was false because I claimed to be making an objective statement about external reality, not about my own subjective perception.

If I say, “The road ahead looks wet to me,” then I am not making a claim about external reality – that the road is actually wet – but rather reporting my own subjective experience of looking down the road.

This transition between the description of personal experience, and the identification of objective fact, is the difference between anecdote and data.

Women are generally shorter than men. Reporting the fact that you know a tall woman just throws static into the music of math.

Objectivity and Honesty

Saying that something looks wet to me, if it really does, is an honest statement. Saying that something is wet, just because it looks wet to me, is a hypothesis. If I see water drops on my window, and I say that I see water drops on my window, I am telling the truth. However, if I see water drops on my window and I say that it is raining, that is a hypothesis. It may have finished raining, or my window may have been hit by water from a sprinkler or a car wash – or from just about anything else for that matter.

The failure to understand or act upon the difference between personal experience and objective hypothesis is catastrophic. But people mistake their personal feelings for objective facts all the time. Someone feels offended and they assume the offender is offensive. Feeling offended is the experience – someone being offensive is a hypothesis that needs to be proved.

The chasm between feeling and proof is fertile ground for manipulative sophists.

Someone makes you angry, so you assume that the instigator is aggressive. You fall in love, and you assume that the object of your affection is wonderful, virtuous and trustworthy. A politician offers you something for free; you assume he is a generous statesman.

Feelings transmit from person to person when we pretend they are objective. This turns them into a form of virus that spreads by mimicking reality. If I can get you to jump to the same conclusions that I’ve come to about reality, based upon my own subjective experiences, then you are much more likely to experience the same emotions that I do. If I am afraid of redheaded people and I can convince you that they are objectively dangerous, then you will also become afraid of redheaded people. My irrational fear has camouflaged itself as objective fact and thus transmitted itself to you.

Ideologies also spread this way. They primarily transmit themselves through emotions rather than reasoned arguments and evidence. If I can convince you that rich people only have money because they have stolen it from you, then you will resent rich people and support using the power of the state to take money from them and give it to you – with me as the highly profitable arbitrator, of course.

If you can convince women that they have been oppressed, beaten, raped and controlled throughout history, then they will inevitably feel anger and resentment towards men. One individual woman’s potentially just anger against one individual man – perhaps her father – gets transmitted throughout the culture using the medium of other susceptible women. Then claims of “sexism” end up being reproduced as very real sexism – against all men.

If you say, “I am angry at a man,” then that is an honest and accurate statement. However, if you say, “I am angry at all men, because all men are oppressive,” then that is a dishonest and inaccurate hyperbole.

This is how anger spreads like a virus.

You own your feelings, which are often highly susceptible to your perceptions. Since perceptions can very easily be wrong, assuming your feelings are mere reflections of perfectly accurate perceptions is a highly shaky stance to take – and very dangerous, should you prove to be wrong.

Philosophy and Subjectivity

Philosophy is the methodology that helps you determine the difference between subjective experiences and objective facts. We need philosophy precisely because mistaking our subjective experiences for objective facts is so easy.

A tree cannot be incorrect, sunlight cannot be erroneous, water cannot take a wrong turn, and fungus cannot be immoral. Truth and falsehood exist as distinct states in only one entity in the universe that we know of: the human mind.

Truth is a state that results when a concept matches an entity or a hypothesis matches the facts of reality.

Truth always refers to concepts or language and the degree to which they match what exists and occurs in objective reality. If I point at a mug and say it is a telephone, we cannot fix my statement by replacing the mug with a telephone. If I call the mug a “telephone,” I am incorrect, because my word does not match what I’m pointing at.

The standard of truth refers not only to the relationship between concepts and objects, but also to concepts about the relationships between objects, such as gravity or magnetism. If I say that “gravity repels,” then I am incorrect; my language does not match the true relationship between mass and gravity. If I say that “magnetism can pull down a tree,” then I am equally incorrect.

The relationship between concepts in the mind and matter or energy in the world is the relationship we refer to as “truth.”

Concepts and Entities

As we grow from infancy, we notice that certain objects in our world exhibit consistent characteristics. Chocolate is sweet, water quenches our thirst, carpets are softer than hardwood, and crayons taste terrible.

We are able to develop accurate conceptual nets to cast around similar objects, so to speak, because those objects have similar or identical characteristics.

The stability of objects and properties in the world is the foundation for the accuracy of our concepts.

If you tried to develop a physics of dreaming, you would quickly realize what an impossible task that would be. When we dream, objects, their properties and the physical laws that govern them change continually and sometimes, it would seem, randomly. Can you imagine trying to play a game of chess where the rules for your various pieces changed continually – and the pieces shifted shape as well? What would it mean to play such a game, let alone win it? In debates, there is a logical fallacy known as “moving the goalposts,” wherein your opponent demands you prove X, and when you do, he then demands you prove Y instead, or in addition. You cannot win such debates, because the rules keep changing – the only way to win is not to play.

Objects in the world are consistent for two basic reasons – the first is the existence of atoms, and the second is the existence of stable physical laws. The atoms that make up a feather possess different characteristics than the atoms that make up a bowling ball. The atoms that make up water are different from the atoms that make up arsenic. Atoms are subject to stable physical laws, which result in consistent object behaviour, information about which our senses then transmit to our brains.

Milk that looks fair may taste foul – our eyesight says it is healthy, our taste buds report its danger. The skin of a shark feels smooth rubbing from head to tail – going the other way reveals the direction of its tiny barbs.

In other words, we have validconcepts because of the consistency of both atomic behaviour and physical laws. (This will be referred to as atomic consistency from now on, for efficiency.)

Since our concepts describe the behaviour of matter and energy, and the behaviour of matter and energy is consistent, our concepts, to be valid – to be true – must also be consistent.

Empirical reality is not self-contradictory – at least at the realm of the senses, where philosophy operates. The realm of quantum mechanics is interesting, of course, but does not impact the realm of philosophy, because quantum phenomena cancels out long before we get to the aggregate realm of sense perception.

A rock is a rock, and not a cloud, fire, or the concept of “rock.”

An elephant is not its shadow, the letter e or a lizard.

An entity cannot be both a living animal and a fossil at the same time.

Relations between entities also cannot be self-contradictory. Gravity and magnetism cannot both repel and attract at the same time, a car cannot move both north and south at the same time, and a ball cannot simultaneously fall towards the ground and rise away from it.

Thus, the properties and relations of entities in reality cannot be self-contradictory – if they appear so, this is due to an erroneous conclusion in our mind. A colour-blind man may report that a rainbow is composed of differing shades of grey, but he would be incorrect because of a deficiency in his eyes. A deaf woman may wonder why people are dancing to mere vibrations, but of course the silence only feels real because of a deficiency in her ears.

Reality is rational and consistent, and valid concepts describe reality – therefore, true and valid concepts must be rational and consistent. A tomato cannot be both a tomato and a beach ball at the same time – thus any concept that requires such a contradiction is naturally invalid.

Science – which describes a consistent, universal and rational reality – must itself be consistent, rational and universal.

Philosophical arguments, which establish truth regarding objective and rational reality, must themselves be objective and rational.

Concepts and Validity

In relation to truth, there are three categories of concepts – valid, potentially valid, and invalid.

A valid and true concept is one that has been verified and established, both by its internal rational consistency, and by its consistency with empirical observations. The idea that the earth is a sphere, rather than flat, is not internally self-contradictory. No one is saying that the earth is both a sphere and flat at the same time. And its roundness has been consistently verified through empirical observations, both on the surface of the earth and in space.

The concept that airplanes can fly is validated by the laws of physics, as well as by the empirical observation – available every day – that airplanes do indeed fly.

The concept that human beings are mortal is validated by the laws of biology, as well by as the empirical observation – available every day – that all human beings eventually die.

These are valid concepts.

Potentially valid concepts are those for which there is no empirical evidence, but no internal self-contradiction either. For instance, the idea that silicone, rather than carbon, could be used as the basis for a living organism is not internally self-contradictory, but there is no evidence as yet of a silicone-based life form. The position that intelligent life could exist on other planets is not internally self-contradictory, but no evidence as yet exists to prove this hypothesis.

Invalid concepts are those that are self-contradictory, and thus can never accurately describe atomic consistency. One example of a self-contradictory concept is the “square circle,” which cannot exist because the characteristics of squares and those of circles contradict each other.

Another example of a self-contradictory entity is the concept of “consciousness without matter.”

We never directly encounter consciousness in the absence of a brain. Empirically, no evidence exists to support the idea that consciousness can exist without matter – and all the evidence supports the reality that consciousness is an effect of matter, specifically the matter (and energy) that composes the human brain.

Could consciousness exist without matter somewhere in the universe?

Certainly not, for the following reasons. Consciousness is an effect of matter, since it requires the physical structure of the brain. Since consciousness is the effect of a physical brain, requiring consciousness without matter would be to require an effect without its proximate cause. Gravity is an effect of matter, of mass – this is by definition and proof, not mere observation. Can we have gravity in the absence of matter? Of course not – again, by definition, hypothesis and empirical observation. Since gravity is an effect of matter, it therefore cannot exist in the absence of matter.

Another way of looking at it is to think of a shadow – a shadow is an effect of opaque mass and light. Can we have a shadow with neither light, nor a mass to block it?

Of course not.

Can we have a sound without a source of that sound? Can we have light without a light source?

Of course not.

Consciousness is an effect of matter – of the physical brain, specifically – and therefore cannot exist in the absence of a brain.

Philosophy, Discomfort and Decisiveness

Such decisiveness in philosophy makes many people uncomfortable. Their immediate mental objective becomes to find some break in the rule, some exception to disprove any and all proposed objective standards.

This is entirely natural, because we often feel that we can release ourselves from obligations to obey or disseminate a rule, if we can find even the tiniest exception to its commandments.

This is the realm of foggy boundaries that confuses even the most consistent thinkers.

If you are drawn to imagining some scenario in which consciousness can exist without matter –even to the point of imagining alternative universes – this is because it provokes emotional anxiety within you to understand that the argument could be so simple.

We can certainly make the unsupported statement that consciousness can exist without matter, and dismiss the argument above – but this lacks intellectual honesty and integrity.

When we feel anxious, the most honest statement we can make is that we feel anxious. Making the anxiety “go away” by inventing some anti-rational magic to dispel the uncomfortable feeling brought about by an assertive argument is dishonest and destructive.

It is entirely understandable, of course, both historically and biologically. Human tribes have always been full of the most anti-rational nonsense – the contradiction of which often provoked either physical or genetic death. Rational thinkers are often targeted for murder, ostracism or de-platforming.

The moment that a dangerously rational idea enters our mind, our anti-rational immune system often attacks it as a foreign, dangerous object in order to protect our capacity for tribal cooperation and genetic reproduction.

Thus, it is entirely natural for you to feel anxiety – and perhaps even hostility – towards a rational argument that may put you in conflict with tribal prejudices. However, let us at least be honest enough to admit that we are anxious and not pretend that the proposed argument is magically invalid.

Materialism and Determinism

The great danger of a materialistic approach to the senses and to objective reality is the hollowing out of free will.

Traditionally, the question of free will has been answered theologically, rather than philosophically. According to most theology, there is an immaterial seat of consciousness within the body called the soul, which is immune to mere physical restrictions – and it is the soul that generates consciousness and free will within the mind.

Creating an immaterial repository of consciousness that is unaffected by the physical domino-causality of matter and energy has generally allowed for the maintenance of the free-will position – however, this “proof” of free will remains philosophically unsatisfying.

Why is this so important?

Without free will, there is no such thing as philosophy. We do not attempt to cultivate wisdom in inanimate objects.

This proves nothing about free will, of course, but clearly reveals the stakes.

Without free will, there is no such thing as personal responsibility, no need or capacity for ethics, and no possibility for loving virtue or opposing evil – since virtue and vice remain delusions. When we stop believing in ghosts, we stop worrying about haunted houses and no longer fear the vengeance of the dead. (The idea of vengeful ghosts was a desperate attempt by more primitive cultures to limit murders – as was the concept of hell – by implanting a fear of consequences that had no relationship to actually being caught by secular authorities.)

In general, the determinist position runs as follows:

Free will is a superstition left over from more religious mindsets. Before we understood the Darwinian origins of the species, we imagined that a God breathed life into clay. Before we understood astronomy, we imagined that the stars were distant fireflies that wheeled around a static earth. The idea that blind matter and energy can somehow coalesce into a consciousness that defies all the restrictions of matter and energy is ridiculous. A rock does not have free will, the sun does not have free will, your arm does not have free will – only your brain, apparently magically, does. Alone in the universe – an infinitesimally small fraction of the matter and energy contained in the universe – the human brain is able to overleap and escape the inevitable restrictions of matter and energy that apply to every other single atom in the universe. If those who believe in free will wish to create a magical exception for the human brain, and make it exempt from the laws of physics that apply both to the human brain and everything else, then they are making an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and none have been provided by those with a mad faith in the magic of free will. In primitive times, mankind felt special because an all-seeing God oversaw an unmoving earth. The earth was the exception to everything else in the universe, because everything else moved. How is the idea that our brains are magically different from everything else in the universe any different from the idea that the earth is magically different from everything else? How exactly does the brain exempt itself from physical laws? The only answer appears to be a bottomless thirst for imaginary choice, a desperate need to feel special, and a darker desire to punish people for their imaginary transgressions – “You had a choice, and you made the wrong choice, so you must be punished!”

These arguments certainly have the ring of consistency to them. How could it be rational to create an exception to the universal laws of physics just for the human brain? We do not see or experience even the idea of free will among animals, among nature, among inanimate objects – how are we so different? The answer that we possess a soul is not satisfying to those who reject immaterial explanations for material causes. If a child denies stealing a cookie and claims that his imaginary friend ate it instead, few parents would accept such an explanation.

However, it remains entirely possible to reject the hypothesis of determinism without providing a purely scientific solution to the question of free will – although some such solutions appear to be emerging.

Free Will: An Introduction

If I stop a man and ask him for directions, and he tells me to go east and west at the same time, I do not need to compare his directions to a map in order to know that he is wrong.

If a man sends me an email containing the argument that emails never get delivered, I do not need to know anything about how emails are delivered in order to reject his hypothesis.

If a woman tells me she does not think I exist, I do not need to know any metaphysical proofs for my own existence in order to reject her hypothesis. Since she addresses her words to me, she cannot rationally claim that I do not exist.

In other words, we first examine the rational consistency of the argument before comparing it to empirical evidence. A self-contradictory argument can be dismissed without the requirement to appeal to contradictory empirical evidence.

If I tell you that you cannot trust the evidence of your senses, and that language is meaningless, these can be positions consistent within themselves, but they are not consistent with my actions.

If I say you cannot trust the evidence of your senses, but I rely upon the trustworthiness of the evidence of your senses in order to communicate my argument, then my argument contradicts its own hypothesis. If I use language to convey to you the idea that language is meaningless, then my methodology contradicts my hypothesis. If language is meaningless, then I cannot use it to convey any idea to you, let alone an idea about language. If language is not meaningless, then I can use it to convey an argument to you, I just can’t use it to convey that language is meaningless, because then my hypothesis contradicts my methodology.

Testing the hypothesis of an argument against the methodology of communicating the argument is a powerful method for rejecting irrational arguments.

You cannot argue that the senses are invalid, since you must use the senses to communicate – the ears for hearing the argument, the eyes for seeing it, and so on.

You cannot use logical arguments to disprove the value of logic.

You cannot use empirical arguments to disprove the value of empiricism.

Before embarking on the task of repudiating a particular hypothesis, it is essential to examine the arguments embedded in the hypothesis. Sophists, in particular, always want to drag you into disproving a hypothesis, when nine times out of ten, the disproof is embedded in the methodology of the way they communicate the argument.

Embedded in every attempt to use the senses to communicate reason and evidence to prove an argument are a number of unshakable assumptions:

1. Reason is infinitely preferable to unreason.
2. Empirical evidence is infinitely preferable to conceptual hypotheses.
3. Truth is infinitely preferable to error.
4. Truth requires rational consistency and empirical evidence.
5. The person communicating the argument and the person receiving it both exist independent of each other within an objective and empirical universe.
6. The senses are valid enough to accurately transmit and receive an argument.
7. Language is meaningful enough to accurately transmit and receive an argument.
8. The person communicating the argument assumes that those receiving the argument have the capacity to change their minds based on reason and evidence.
9. Rational argument is superior to physical force.

This list goes on for a long time, but you get the general idea. The very act of engaging in a debate reveals a packaged list of accepted assumptions and axioms that really need to be examined before everyone goes around chasing the conclusion and debating the surface arguments.

One of the main problems people have with debates is that implicit assumptions are not made explicit, but become horrifyingly clear over the course of a disastrous conversation. If a man wants to debate you, and he openly states that he considers truth equivalent to error, reason equivalent to screaming, that he will never ever change his mind, and if you refuse to submit to his argument, he will kick you hard in the shins – would you agree to debate him?

So often, people pretend to debate, when they are really seeking to dominate, justify themselves, or frustrate others.

Causality and Determinism

The determinist position states that the human mind is not magically exempt from the general laws of causality in the universe.

If determinists really accept this position, then clearly they should not treat the human mind any differently from any other object in the universe.

If you owe me ten dollars and I say I don’t care which ten-dollar bill you give me, then I have no rational right to object to any one ten-dollar bill.

If you ask me whether I would prefer pasta or fish for dinner, and I tell you I have no preference whatsoever, does it make any sense for me to rage at you for serving me fish, and throw the plate out the window? If I do such a crazy thing, then clearly I was lying to you when I said I had no preference.

To go even further – and trust me, even this isn’t going far enough – if your wife tells you she doesn’t care whether you both go to Florida or California for vacation, and you choose Florida, and she then tells you only a truly insane person would ever vacation in Florida and she thinks you are mentally ill for even suggesting it, what would you think of her behaviour?

You would think that she was crazy, right? To say that she has no preference – and then to scream that you are insane for choosing one thing over the other only reveals her own instability, hypocrisy and dangerously manipulative nature.

The determinist position is that the human brain is exactly like everything else in the universe. The brain contains no special magical capacity for free will – and believing it does is akin to believing that the last domino in a stacked line chooses to fall over when it is bumped by the previous falling domino.

Very well, let us take determinists at their word – the human brain is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, and therefore should be treated no differently from anything else.

The human brain has no free will, just like a television, a blade of grass, a cloud, a clock or a water tower.

A sports fanatic may very well encourage his team by yelling at the television, but he does not believe that his team is able to hear him and change their behaviour based on his ranting. A gambler may cheer for a lucky roll, but he does not think his cheering encourages the dice to do what he wants.

People will vent at inanimate objects – a golfer may throw his club in frustration – but we recognize this as immaturity. When questioned, the angry golfer does not argue that his club has grown a brain and free will and works viciously to thwart his desire for a good swing. It is an irrational eccentricity to treat inanimate objects as if they have a human brain. When people do, we do not believe their tantrums are philosophically sound – and neither do they, we hope, after they calm down.

If a man stabs a woman, we do not blame the knife for dragging the poor man’s hand towards her flesh. We do not blame his hand, we do not blame his arm – we blame his consciousness, if we blame anything at all.

This is then the central question for those who hold the determinist position: If human consciousness is exactly the same as everything else in the universe, then why do you treat human consciousness so differently?

This is really the heart of the matter. A determinist believes that the human mind has no more free will than a television set, but a determinist would look at someone arguing with a television set and say, that person is crazy!

In the Shakespearean drama King Lear, the mad king rages at a storm. This is considered a sign of insanity – but why? The weather is a highly complex system, whose behaviour can only be predicted in the short term, and in general. Even determinists admit that a group of human beings is a highly complex system, and human behaviour can only be predicted in the short term, and in general – as in the basic economic premise that human beings respond to incentives.

Raging at a man who has done you great evil is not insane. Raging at a storm clearly is. But for a determinist, what is the difference? The man has no more free will than the storm, so raging at the man is exactly the same as raging at the storm.

If you are injured by the side of the road, you may choose to flag down a passing motorist in the hope of getting help. If a tumbleweed is blowing down the road, would any sane person try to flag it down to beg for help?

If you park your car at the bottom of a hill, go for a hike, and then return to see a large boulder has fallen on your car, you will no doubt be upset, but you will scarcely drag the boulder to court and demand it pay reparations for damaging your car.

However, if someone runs up to you and says that they saw a man pushing the boulder down the hill, then you have a very different situation. If you can find that man, you can get angry at him and demand that he pay reparations for damaging your car.

Why?

What’s the difference?

Suppose that a hard rain had loosened the foundations keeping the boulder in place, causing it to roll down the hill and crush your car. These are mere acts of physical determinism – no choices are involved, no free will is involved. It is just matter and objects obeying inevitable physical laws.

However, if it turns out that a man purposefully dislodged the boulder that ended up rolling down the hill and crushing your car, is it really that hard to understand that we have an entirely different situation?

If it turns out that the man who dislodged the boulder has a grudge against you and pushed it on purpose to crush your car – perhaps with the hope that you were inside it – then it is not even an accidental occurrence.

When I was a little boy, I liked throwing rocks. Once, when I was walking with my mother by the side of the road, I threw a rock in the air, and it ended up landing on the expensive hood of some man’s sports car, leaving a white spiderweb of divots. I was very young, so the man mostly got angry at my mother for letting me engage in such risky behaviour.

The first situation is where the rock dislodges on its own, in which case the crushing of your car is no one’s fault – except possibly yours, for parking in a place where that could happen.

In the second case, a man dislodges a rock just for fun, crushing your car by accident. He acts carelessly and dangerously, and therefore is responsible for the car being crushed, but not responsible for wilfully crushing your car. A reasonably just solution would be to have him pay for repairs, but not to put him in jail for trying to cause you harm.

In the third case, the man dislodges a rock with the intention of crushing your car. He is then responsible for wilfully damaging the car, and therefore he should face sanctions over and above merely paying to have it repaired.

If the man’s actions were careless, the financial consequences of his carelessness should teach him to be more careful.

If the man’s actions were malevolent, then mere financial consequences would not likely be enough to prevent him from trying to hurt you in the future, which is why further punishments are needed to keep you – and society – safe.

Thus, we have accident, carelessness or malevolence. If you are a determinist, these different situations are exactly the same,because there is no difference between a boulder and a human being. The boulder has no free will, and the human being has no free will either.

If one boulder crashed into another boulder, and the second boulder crashed into my car, we would not hold the first boulder “responsible,” because it was just obeying the blind laws of physics.

Why would it be any different, if you are a determinist, with a man? A man is just a boulder, no different at all.

If, from the bottom of the hill, you look up and see a man pushing at a boulder that could fall on your car, you would surely call out for him to stop. If he has already dislodged the boulder, do you think you would call out for the boulder itself to stop in its tracks?

If you are a parent, and you see your child running too fast down a hill, you will most likely call out for your child to slow down. If you are a parent, and you see a boulder rolling downhill, does it make any sense to call out for the boulder to slow down?

If you are a determinist, you need to explain why you call out to the child, but not to the boulder, since both are identical, in your worldview. The child has no free will, and the boulder has no free will.

Determinists reply to this objection by saying that the child has an input and can change his behaviour based on external stimuli, such as a parent calling out for the child to slow down.

But that’s the point, now, isn’t it?

The child can change his behaviour.

The determinist would reply that the child can change his behaviour just as a dog can change its behaviour and come running towards you if you call its name. Are we saying the dog also has free will, and that its free will is equivalent to that of a human being?

Furthermore, you could program a robot to respond to your voice commands, and the robot would “change its behaviour” based upon what you say. Are we then saying that the robot has free will?

Although this may seem like a compelling argument, it actually works against the determinist position.

Referring to a mechanical device such as a robot in lieu of a person does not solve the problem of human consciousness and choice because it takes a human being to create a robot. It’s like saying I have superhero hearing because I can hear someone talking from thousands of miles away – when all I have done is use a phone.

Saying a robot is like a human being is ridiculous, because a robot is created and programmed by human beings. Do we often mistake a radio for a person, or an MP3 for the band? If a friend of yours stands at the bottom of a canyon and calls back every word that you shout down, is he exactly the same as an echo?

If a robot is like a human being, then the argument is that entities that can respond to spoken commands must have been created by an external intelligence. Do determinists really want to make the case for God in that manner? You cannot have a robot without an external non-robot living intelligence that created it. Thus by this logic you cannot have a human being without an external non-human living intelligence that created it.

If determinists want to compare humans to robots, they subsequently create a logical avenue proving the existence of God. Once God’s existence is established, or at least allowed, then determinism becomes falsified, because you have a consciousness – in the form of God – that is not bound by any known physical laws or properties. Once you allow for the existence of consciousness without a material basis, then you open up the possibility of the soul. This disproves determinism, because then choice can be made immaterially, unbound by any material constraints. In this scenario, if every material action is triggered by a prior material action, the only chance to escape this inevitable causality must be for an immaterial cause to intervene. If reality unfolds like dominoes falling against each other, then the only chance for choice must be something that is not a domino, not material, such as the soul.

If God exists, then immaterial consciousness exists. Since determinism is bound only by the material, immaterial consciousness escapes the inevitabilities of determinism.

No, determinism cannot be proved with reference to anything other than human consciousness. If free will is valid, then a man can choose to create a robot. The deterministic nature of the robot tells you nothing about the choices of the man. I can choose to throw a rock off a cliff. The fact that the rock’s path is then determined tells you nothing about whether my brain is determined. Referencing the effects of free will to disprove free will is like using a statue’s shadow to disprove a statue.

I would sooner say that an elevator allows a man to defy the laws of gravity than I would say the existence of a robot disproves free will.

Regarding the dog example – yes, a dog can come when you call him, but that does not support the determinist position. A dog’s brain is more complex than a worm’s brain, and we can expect a dog to come when we call him, but not a worm. We can train a dog, but not a worm. Thus this argument supports the concept of free will, since a more advanced and complex brain is used as an example, rather than a simpler and less complex brain. The capacities of a dog are invoked, not the capacities of a worm.

It’s not so much that dogs come when you call them, but rather that human beings recognize that dogs have a sophisticated enough brain to be trained to come when you call them. No one tries to train a boulder to come when you call it, for obvious reasons.

Since a more complex brain is required for the argument against free will, it supports the argument for free will, since the human brain is the most complex of all.

Arguments and Uniqueness

Ask yourself this – can you imagine debating with any known entity other than a human being?

I don’t debate with the television, because the television has no free will, and will not change.

I understand when the behaviour of an entity is predetermined, and so do not pretend that I can have any effect on its behaviour. I do not debate with clouds, watches, robots or heating ducts. I only debate human beings – and only some human beings, to be more precise.

Because I deal with human beings as the only entities I can debate with, I cannot then put them in the same category of every other conceivable entity that I will not debate with. If I consider it sane to debate with a human being, but consider it insane to debate with a television – as surely it is – then it would be insane for me to treat these two entities as the same.

It is hard to think of any categories as singular and oppositional as the difference between entities you are willing to debate with, and entities it would be insane to pretend to debate with. Try it – try and think of a category that small and that oppositional to everything not in that category.

It is virtually impossible.

Determinism and Uncertainty

You do not have to be able to explain a phenomenon in order to accept it. You also do not have to be able to explain a phenomenon in order to reject irrational pretend explanations of it.

I do not have to be able to explain the origins of the universe in order to accept that the universe exists. I do not know the incontrovertible facts about the origins of the universe, but I reject that it was created by a giant space turtle, that it was both created and destroyed simultaneously, or that it expanded and contracted at the same time, and so on.

A baseball pitcher does not need to know the detailed equations of air resistance to be able to throw a ball, nor to understand that he cannot throw a ball in opposite directions at the same time.

Determinists will often demand that those who accept free will provide an incontrovertible explanation of the origin and process of free will. This is a silly form of intellectual baiting, similar to theists who demand that atheists provide an incontrovertible explanation of the origin and process of the universe, or supply the details of every conceivable stage of evolution.

I cannot explain free will; I cannot describe and provide incontrovertible explanations of its origins and processes – but so what? Before Darwin, no one had any idea how complex life came about – does that mean that they had no right to believe in horses or people, or the value of selective breeding? Because I cannot accurately describe the development and evolution of my eyes, does that mean I cannot open them and see?

All knowledge is preceded by ignorance – that is the entire point of knowledge. Knowing what you know, and knowing what you don’t know – but could know – is the entire progress of human thought. Admitting you don’t know something is not a confession of impotence, but of possibility. The fact that we don’t yet know all the biological underpinnings of free will gives us something to explore, to examine – a goal to pursue. It is not a bad thing – it is a wonderful thing. It is not a failing; it is an opportunity.

Demanding that we not accept or believe in something before we can explain everything about it is truly putting the cart before the horse. I must believe in a stable phenomenon before I can examine its underlying causes, which is one reason why I am interested in the physics of objective reality, and not in the physics of nightly dreaming. I must believe that something exists before I will set aside time to find and examine it. I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t spend any time trying to find and examine them. I don’t believe in telepathy, so I don’t check out my prowess in the field. I’m not trying to find investors to fund a dragon zoo, either, since that involves fiat currency, which is even less real than fire-breathing lizards.

I must believe in something before I invest my scarce and precious resources to investigate it. I have written this book based on the belief that I can achieve truth – you are reading it because you believe philosophy has value, and are willing to hear original proofs for complex positions.

Demanding that I be able to prove everything about free will before I can accept free will is ridiculous. If ultimate proof were required for any acceptance, then no patient hierarchy of knowledge building would be possible – no one could have any theories on physics before atoms were discovered – and all current theories would be invalid and useless because no unified field theory has yet been developed.

However, the stability and predictability of matter and energy were accepted long before atoms were discovered – and such stability is accepted by lower and less complex life forms as well, down to and including jellyfish. Just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we can’t know some things. It’s a cheap and silly way to tell people to shut up, and it is fundamentally anti-scientific in nature.

What Is Free Will?

The definition of free will is challenging and complicated, because it must be something unique to the human mind – therefore, it cannot be anything as simple and tautological as “choice.”

One unique capability of the human mind is to compare proposed actions to abstract standards. A beaver will build a dam, but a beaver does not use a blueprint to design the dam. A bird will fly, but a bird does not plot out a flight course on a map ahead of time.

One defining aspect of human consciousness is our capacity for morality, which is basically comparing proposed actions to ideal standards. When we think of the “big four” evil actions – theft, rape, assault and murder – moral responsibility requires that we have the capacity to compare proposed actions to abstract standards. If we want to steal something, we can compare our action to a standard such as “stealing is wrong.”

(Please understand that this is not a proof of morality, which will come later in this book, but an example of commonly accepted moral reasoning.)

Free will does not mean that we can do anything we want – that would be omnipotence. We are not free to fly unaided, or jump to Mars. But it does mean that we have the capacity to compare our proposed actions to abstract standards – ideal standards, generally.

Some of these ideal standards are pure abstractions – Platonic, almost – such as a universal respect for persons and property. Others are more personal, reciprocal and empathetic – “How would you like it if someone stole from you?”

Children who don’t want to eat their dinner are sometimes informed of the existence of starving children in the Third World. Challenges sometimes referred to as “First World problems” are generally marked as being silly and unimportant relative to the survival challenges of living in a poverty-stricken landscape.

We may refrain from stealing because we accept that stealing is universally wrong – or we may refrain from stealing because we empathize with the upset and anger that our potential victim would doubtless experience.

(We also may refrain from stealing because we fear punishment by an all-knowing and all-seeing God, but such cause and effect has little place in a book on philosophy. I refer you to any number of theological works for more information on this perspective.)

The comparison of potential actions to abstract rules falls into the category of direct moralizing. The comparison of such actions to negative emotions falls into the category of empathy, or indirect moralizing.

In the first case, the principle is that stealing is wrong; in the second, it is that actions that cause negative emotions are wrong, and stealing just happens to be one of those.

I fully understand that the phrase “stealing is wrong” is not satisfying philosophically, and I will strive to satisfy you philosophically later in the book. I also understand that the supposed “principle” called “don’t make people feel bad” is even less satisfying, for a variety of reasons we will get into later.

However, we certainly must accept that human beings have the capacity to develop universal abstractions – abstractions that have a positive obligation. If you want to learn truths about the physical world, you need to use the scientific method. If you want to build a bridge that stands up efficiently, you need to use principles of engineering. If you want to sell medicine that makes people better, you need to use the principle of medical research – in particular, the double-blind experiment – to stave off the inevitable possibility of mistaking the placebo effect and other false positives for an imaginary cure.

Given that we have the capacity to develop universal abstractions with positive obligations – abstractions that we need to use to objectively achieve a particular end – we must also accept that we have the capacity to compare our proposed actions to those universal abstractions.

When we ask a child to accept that two and two make four, we are not asking the child to believe this truth for any particular instance, but rather for all instances of that equation. It’s not just that these two coconuts and two coconuts make four coconuts, but rather that two and two of anything make four. When we ask a child to write the number “4” on an answer sheet, we are asking the child to compare his proposed action – writing a number – with the ideal standard of writing the correct number.

With regards to criminal guilt, we generally think of punishing a man because he knew what he was doing at the time was wrong. If a man is insane, has a brain disease, or is mentally retarded to the point that he does not have the capacity to know the immorality of his actions, then we may decide to confine him, not as a moral punishment, but rather just to keep everyone else safe.

We may decide to put down a dog that keeps biting people – not as a moral punishment, and certainly not as any kind of ethical instruction to other dogs, but rather just to keep people from being bitten.

Thus we do not judge a man morally if we decide that he is unable to morally judge his own actions. In other words, if he is unable to compare his contemplated actions to an ideal moral standard, then we do not judge him to be in possession of free will. We do not expect a rabid dog to understand that the initiation of the use of force is immoral, and so we do not call such dogs evil for biting.

A raccoon that steals our food is not dragged off to court and tried as a thief.

If we do not have the capacity to compare our own potential actions to some idealized standard, then we can never be held morally responsible for failing to conform to that standard.

Imagine that a thief steals a wallet, and then has that wallet stolen from him in turn. The thief cries out in frustration at the violation of his “property rights.” We can clearly see the hypocrisy here. The thief violates his original victim’s property rights, and then in turn has his own rights violated as another thief takes off with the stolen property.

Can we imagine applying this judgement of hypocrisy to any other animal in the world? If a squirrel steals a nut from another squirrel, and in turn is stolen from, would we call the first squirrel a hypocrite for chasing the second “thief”?

Of course not – because we recognize that the squirrel does not have the capacity to compare a potential theft to the concept of universal property rights.

We were all asked when we were children, if we hit another child, “How would you like it if another child hit you?” The endless repetition of this empathy programming – along with other factors – helped us develop a sense of responsibility for the feelings of others as we grew up. The golden rule – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – is a reflection of this basic understanding. As human adults, we are generally expected to recognize that other human beings have feelings and preferences, just as we do, which need to be taken into account when considering potential actions.

Another mantra we hear as children is: “You should have known better!” In this context, “better” means having “higher standards of behaviour.”

When you were a child, you doubtless attempted to avoid punishment for bad behaviour by saying that your friends told you to do something. At which point, adults doubtless asked whether you would jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or Toronto’s CN Tower if your friends told you to do that as well. Of course you wouldn’t, which means that you had the capacity to judge the value of your friends’ suggestions. You were increasingly required to use your own judgement, rather than blame your friends.

The entire purpose of civilizing children is to get them to compare their proposed actions to ideal standards – in a philosophical society, this means reason and evidence.

In Christian societies, the ideal standard is the Ten Commandments, combined with: What would Jesus do?

Morality itself is the comparison of proposed actions to ideal standards. Criminal judgement is the comparison of past actions to ideal standards. In other words, criminal judgement occurs when there has been a failure in moral judgement, which manifested in illegal action.

A baby who urinates on you has no capacity to compare his urination options to ideal standards – the average teenager who urinates on you is committing an egregious action.

When we think of a speeder on a highway, we condemn that person. We assume the driver has the capacity to compare his current speed with the ideal standard, the speed limit, and has chosen to exceed it.

If the speeder turns out to be drunk, we recognize that he is making decisions with diminished capacity – but this does not, of course, let him off the hook. The ideal standard in this situation is not make good decisions while you drive drunk, but rather do not drive while you are drunk. It is a simple fact that people make poor decisions when drunk – not to mention having slower reaction times. Every driver knows this, so he is responsible for the decision of getting drunk and then driving, not for making bad decisions while driving drunk.

If a man ties a blindfold over his eyes while he is driving, we do not blame him for hitting a garden gnome, since he cannot see. Instead, we blame him for tying the blindfold over his eyes. The ideal standard here is not don’t hit garden gnomes, but rather do not drive if you cannot see.

Similarly, if a driver hit a garden gnome because his brakes failed, and it turns out he had not maintained his brakes, we blame him not because his brakes failed, but because he chose to avoid necessary maintenance. On the other hand, if his car was well maintained, but someone sabotaged his brakes, then of course the person who tinkered with his car is to blame.

This can get quite complicated. If you set events in motion that produce a particular outcome, even if you did not anticipate and do not want that outcome, you can still be responsible. A fascinating example arises out of common law, wherein if a robber runs into a store, and the cashier shoots at him to prevent the robbery and accidentally hits and kills another customer, it is the robber who is charged with murder, not the cashier. The robber set the events in motion that resulted in the death of the customer, although the robber doubtless did not want the customer to die. In this case, the ideal standard is don’t rob – one reason being that highly random and uncertain events may be set in motion.

Another example is a simple barroom brawl that results in one man dying because he falls and hits his head on the edge of the bar. The man brawling with him probably did not want to kill him, but is still responsible for the death. He would be charged with a lesser offense than first-degree murder, but the charge would be more than simple assault. Everyone who gets into a bar fight recognizes that entirely unanticipated and even unwanted injuries can occur, just as every robber understands the same thing. Violence is almost always a form of Russian roulette.

No matter where we look in the realm of ethics or free will, we understand that there is ideal behaviour, and someone who has knowledge of that behaviour can choose to behave in non-conforming ways. If I go to a foreign country where I do not understand the customs, I can be forgiven for acting in ways that may otherwise be considered offensive – because I am not aware of the ideal standards, and therefore I am not consciously deviating from them.

If I fail to study for a test, I am deviating from an ideal standard. If I exercise or train to the point of injury, I am deviating from an ideal standard. If I’m attracted to an available woman and I do not ask her out, I am deviating from an ideal standard of courage. If I ask her out every day for a year, I am also deviating from the ideal standard of consideration.

Sometimes the ideal standard is an absolute – thou shalt not kill.

Sometimes the ideal standard is more relative, like the Aristotelian mean. Too much courage is foolhardiness; too little courage is cowardice.

Where the ideal standard is an absolute, there we generally find morality. Where the ideal standard is relative, there we generally find aesthetics, culture, politeness or other forms of social standards enforced by disapproval and ostracism rather than through retaliatory force. You can shoot someone who’s attacking you; you cannot shoot someone for being rude.

There are entities that conform to ideal standards, but which do not have a choice – computers fall into this category. I can program a robot to kill people Terminator style, and that robot will conform to the ideal standards of my programming – but it has no choice. I could throw a random algorithm in the air, so that 10 percent of the time the killer robot will show mercy and let its victim live, but we would not assume I had given the robot any free will – randomness is not the same as choice.

If we understand this definition of free will – our human capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards – then the debate between determinism and choice becomes much easier to resolve.

With this definition in hand, we can clearly see that when a determinist tries to argue you out of your free-will position, the determinist is asking you to compare your position that free will is true to an ideal standard called determinism is true.

However, by asking the supporter of free will to compare the contents of his mind to an ideal standard, the determinist is already supporting the free-will position.

If a man attempts to correct a woman’s position, he is asking her to compare the contents of her mind to the ideal standard of truth – and if the contents of her mind do not conform to the ideal standard of truth, then she should discard them, and accept the truth.

Such a man accepts free will, because he accepts that human beings have the capacity to compare the contents of their mind to the ideal standard of truth – and free will is defined as our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.

I realize that I may be seen to have switched the definition a little bit – from “comparing his proposed actions to an ideal standard,” to “comparing the contents of his mind to an ideal standard,” but the two are really one and the same. The contents of the mind can only be discerned through actions, such as speaking or writing.

Change Your Mind, Change Your Behaviour

If I were able to convince you that the world is a sphere and not flat, I would attempt to do so only because I would expect you to no longer speak about supporting the flat earth model, and instead support that the world is in fact a sphere. If you continued to support the flat earth hypothesis, I would be confused and annoyed. I would say: “But you admitted that the world was a sphere!” If you replied, “Yes, the world is a sphere. I accept and admit that, but I’m still going to publicly talk about the world being flat” – well, that wouldn’t make much sense, would it?

Changing your mind without changing your behaviour makes no sense at all. It might happen for occasional reasons – think of priests who lose their faith, but continue in their occupation – but overall it is both strange and rare for such contradictions between thought and action to manifest. In general, a conflict between belief and behaviour only occurs where generally selfish incentives exist – a desire to continue drawing a salary, maintain a marriage, or avoid hostility or even attack from an ideological or religious group, for example. Most of us would have sympathy for a person keeping secret thoughts separate from public actions out of fear of consequences, but that is not what I’m talking about.

We strive to change people’s minds because we hope to alter their future actions – and conversations and debates and arguments are all potential future actions.

Determinism: What Changes?

Imagine that I used to be deeply religious. I went to church, prayed, baptized my children, donated 10 percent of my income to the church, volunteered, and did charity and missionary work – all in the name of my faith.

Now, imagine that one day I tell you I have become an atheist. What would you expect, in terms of my behaviour?

Surely you would expect me to stop going to church, stop praying, stop donating to the church and so on.

What if I told you I was an atheist, but nothing about my behaviour was going to change – I was going to continue attending church, praying and so on?

Surely you would be confused about my change of mind. Wouldn’t it be strange if I said I no longer believed in God, but I continued exactly the same behaviours as when I did believe in God?

Let us go one step further in terms of strangeness. Imagine that when I was religious, I spent countless hours converting other people to my religion. Surely you would expect this behaviour to change when I claimed to have lost my faith and became an atheist.

It’s one thing to pursue something you don’t believe in personally – it’s quite another to pour enormous energies into convincing other people of something you no longer believe in.

However bizarre this behaviour may appear, however incomprehensible and contradictory it is, it still falls far short of the irrationality of the determinist.

If I have a mental illness and believe that the president of the United States is speaking directly to me through my television set, and I spend an enormous amount of time talking back to him, engaging in imaginary conversations and debates – all with the deluded belief that I am profoundly altering public policy in America – surely this is something I should be cured of, not indulged in.

So – what exactly do I need to be cured of? What exactly is the nature of my delusion?

Well, I am confusing an inanimate object – a television – with a conscious human being.

If I were actually teleconferencing with the president of the United States, and we were having actual conversations, this would not be a delusion to be cured, but perhaps a position of influence to be envied.

However, if in reality I am merely yelling at a television, then clearly I need to be disabused of the fantasy that I am having a conversation, since the television is a mere mechanical object that possesses no free will of its own.

Are you beginning to see the problem?

The reason I should stop debating with my television is that my television does not possess free will.

We can imagine a similar and more understandable situation where you think you are debating a real live person on the other end of an internet chat program, when it turns out the program is an automatic “bot” response system.

Decades ago, there was a little program for primitive computers called “Eliza” that mimicked the neutral passive responses of a stereotypical psychiatrist. If you poured your heart out to this program and it prompted you to be more open, speak more honestly, and say more, it would be easy to imagine the computer had developed curiosity and empathy.

If you think you are talking to a person and it turns out you are talking to a robot, you would probably give up on the conversation, since you would recognize that the robot does not possess free will.

If I stop believing in ghosts, it makes sense for me to stop ghost hunting.

If I say that I have switched from being a Democrat to a Republican, but I continue to vote Democrat, and convert other people to Democrat positions, what does that mean?

I am a staunch empiricist, which means I judge people not by their words, but by their deeds – as the old biblical saying goes, “By their deeds shall you know them.”

I care what people say, but I really care what they do, since the truth of the mind is found in actions, not words. If someone claims to have learned better, but continues to do worse, I know they have not in fact learned better.

As Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do.

If I am hiking through a thick forest with someone, and she claims she wants to get to a certain distant destination, and knows how to get there, but refuses to check our direction with a map, a compass or a GPS, I know she is far more interested in being “right” than going in the right direction.

We are all generally raised with the personal responsibility of free will. As a child, if I took another child’s toy, I was told to give it back, and I learned the virtue of sharing, or respecting other people’s property. If I took another child’s toy, no one ever said about me, “Well, little Stef is just a machine. He has no free will, he’s just doing what he does, and there’s no point blaming him, any more than there is any point blaming a cloud for raining on you.”

If a boy deliberately drives a remote-controlled toy car into a dozing cat, we blame the boy, not the toy – but for a determinist, there is no difference between the two. Does the determinist refrain from assigning any responsibility to the boy? Somehow, I doubt it.

We are all raised embedded in the notion of free will, personal responsibility and ethics – in this sense, we are all raised religious. At some point, determinists discard the idea of free will, just as some religious people discard the idea of God.

My eternal question to determinists is: Now that you have given up on the idea of free will, what changes?

What does change? I have had countless public debates with determinists, and I have never once received a straight answer. Determinists call into my philosophy show aiming to change my mind about free will. They bring arguments and evidence and empiricism and science to bear on the question, in the hopes that I will accept their perspective and change my mind. They want me to use my power to change my mind to give up on the idea that I can change my mind.

Once I accept that an entity does not have free will – a robot, for instance – then I no longer invest time and energy debating with that entity.

In video games, there are often preprogrammed enemies that attack you. I’ve never heard of any sane individual trying to reason these computerized avatars into pacifism or trying to get the two-dimensional robots to accept the non-aggression principle and learn how to debate, rather than fire giant rockets at their digital opponent’s head. Computer enemies in a video game have no free will of their own, so no one tries to reason with them. In massive combat games, no one ever offers up treaty conditions to the computerized opponent – assuming this option is not programmed into the game somehow – because the computer opponent is just following its predetermined script.

To put it another way, imagine that you woke up tomorrow with certain proof that everyone around you was a preprogrammed robot with no free will of their own. Surely this would be a shattering experience and would change your behaviour in countless fundamental ways.

Would you bother continuing to follow politics if you knew you could have absolutely no impact upon the outcome? Do you currently campaign to change the outcome of past elections?

Furthermore, imagine if you woke up the day after tomorrow with certain proof that you yourself were also a preprogrammed robot with no free will of your own. Would you give up trying to debate the other robots? Would this knowledge change your behaviour in any way?

It seems to me impossible to imagine that such a shattering revelation would have no impact on how you felt, what you thought, or what you did.

In the science-fiction movie The Matrix, one character decides he wishes to return to the artificial delusions created by the master robots – but the only way he can do that is by erasing his knowledge that his prior life was in fact a delusion. A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape – and morally and philosophically speaking, what is more important than the question of free will versus determinism?

If I accept certain absolutes, they must change my behaviour – that is how we know I accept them. If I think I can fly unaided, I am cured when I no longer try to fly unaided. As long as I continue the attempts, I am not cured, no matter what I say.

If I truly accept the idea that everyone – myself included – is just a robot, with no capacity for choice, free will, morality, preferring any particular state over any other state, or the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, then I will stop trying to change people’s minds. I must stop debating people, I must stop trying to improve the world, I must stop pretending to prefer truth over falsehood, and I must give up on the ideas of morality, personal responsibility, or any preferred state – such as freedom – over any other state, such as tyranny.

I must also give up on the idea of punishment. If a man uses a phone to call in a bomb threat, we don’t put the phone in jail, because the phone has no free will. If the man also has no free will, then it makes about as much sense to throw him in jail as it does to throw the phone in jail.

Of course, determinists respond that human beings receive inputs and you can change their behaviour – to which I say, sure, that’s what I believe as well, since I accept free will.

This is the boringly repetitive pattern of debating with determinists. You point out the logical consequences of their beliefs, and they deny those logical consequences. I say the logical consequence of accepting determinism is refraining from debating people – they say that they can be determinists and still debate people.

I say the logical consequence of accepting determinism is giving up on the idea of morality – they say they can be determinists and still believe in morality.

I say the logical consequence of accepting determinism is giving up on the idea of truth – they say they can be determinists and still believe in truth.

In other words, they accept all of the consequentialist results of accepting free will, while calling themselves determinists.

This is quite literally insane.

Here is the equivalent: “If you no longer believe in God, it doesn’t make any sense to continue going to church.”

“Oh no, I can stop believing in God and it still makes perfect sense to go to church.”

“If you no longer believe in God, you no longer believe in heaven.”

“Oh no, I can stop believing in God, but still totally believe in heaven.”

Ditto for praying, trying to convert other people to your faith, putting your trust in a higher power – all these and more should logically be eliminated in your mind along with your belief in God. But determinists wish to keep all the fruits of free will, while denying free will.

“Once you accept that the television set is not the president, it makes no sense to continue pretending to have a conversation with the television.”

“Oh no, I totally accept that it’s just a television set, but that in no way prevents me from having a conversation with the president.”

What can one do in these situations?

Walk away. Fixing that mess is a job for mental health professionals, not philosophers.

Determinism and Emergent Properties

Reducing objects to their mere material properties is truly a reduction to absurdity. Wood is partly composed of carbon atoms, and tables are made of wood – thus because I cannot put my plate on a carbon atom, I cannot put my plate on a table either!

Atoms are mostly space; therefore, I can walk through a wall!

Carbon is the basis of life. However, no carbon atom can be alive; therefore, there is no such thing as life!

Carbon atoms are found in dead things and inert things, as well as living things – therefore, there is no difference between dead things, inert things and living things.

No individual player can win against a professional soccer team –therefore, eleven individual players can never win against a professional soccer team.

Metal cannot float; therefore, a ship made of metal cannot float.

You get the idea.

Life is an emergent property of matter. If you get enough particular kinds of matter together, with the right configuration of energy, you get life. A pregnant woman is a wonderful mechanism for converting celery into consciousness. Atoms in a piece of celery end up among the atoms of a growing brain, where – in conjunction with a wide variety of other factors – they achieve consciousness.

No individual celery atom gains consciousness, of course, and no celery is conscious, but through the process of a woman’s pregnancy, each atom in the food she consumes contributes to consciousness. Celery is not human, but it can contribute to and become part of a human being.

No individual atom is alive, yet life exists.

No individual atom or cell is conscious, yet consciousness exists.

No life exists in the absence of atoms, yet no individual atom is alive.

No consciousness exists in the absence of atoms, yet no individual atom is conscious.

Remove one individual atom from a life form and it continues to live. Remove one individual atom from a brain, consciousness continues. Remove enough – up to some biochemical tipping point – and both life and consciousness cease to be.

Thus, life is an emergent property. None of its individual components possess it, yet in combination, life comes into being. Consciousness is also an emergent property. None of its individual components possess it, yet in their combination, we start to think.

Life and consciousness are shared by a wide variety of other creatures – but free will is a uniquely human phenomenon. No other organism that we know of can consciously compare proposed actions to ideal abstract standards.

Accepting that life and consciousness are emergent properties of matter and energy, but denying free will on the basis of physics, is a ridiculously self-contradictory position. No carbon atom can comprehend science, yet human beings can. Using a discipline that is itself an emergent property to deny the existence of an emergent property such as free will is beyond foolish.

No carbon atom can walk, eat, reproduce or die – yet carbon-based life forms exhibit all these characteristics.

No individual atom can see, but our eyes can see.

No individual atom can get cancer, but we certainly can.

Reducing the human mind to mere empty matter and energy denies the reality of the very emergent properties that give us the capacity to commit such a logical fallacy. To make an error, we must be alive and conscious. To deny emergent properties is to deny the very capacities that give rise to our ability to get arguments so spectacularly wrong.

Please understand that this is not definitive proof of free will – however, it is a strong repudiation of the idea that we can judge consciousness on the basis of its merely material components. While it is true that all atoms are subject to the iron laws of physics, this does not tell us anything about their capacities under emergent properties. Carbon atoms cannot initiate their own movement – yet, when aggregated as an animal, they can.

If you prefer a more physical example, no individual atom can arrest the direction of light. However, if you get enough atoms together and compress them enough to form a black hole, then light cannot escape such a gravity well.

Or, no individual atom gives off light, yet the sun, which is composed of atoms, gives off light.

Reducing the complexities of consciousness, life and free will to mere empty materialism is ridiculous and an intellectual embarrassment, to be perfectly frank. To see how ridiculous the position is, all you need to do is remember this basic fact: No individual atom can possess a theory of determinism; therefore, no theory of determinism exists.

If you wish to argue against the proposition that free will can be an emergent property of consciousness – specifically, human consciousness – you are more than welcome to do that, but then you need to explain why free will is different from life, or consciousness itself. Both life and consciousness are emergent properties of matter. So you already accept that new properties emerge from aggregations. You cannot then draw some imaginary line in the sand and say: “Well, life and consciousness are emergent properties that possess characteristics that none of their individual components possess. But free will must be judged outside the bounds of emergent properties and can never be justified, because no individual atom in the human mind possesses free will.”

You cannot have it both ways. If you accept the emergent properties of life and consciousness, you cannot then arbitrarily deny the emergent property of free will.

A Hypothesis of Determinism

All this is elementary logic, not particularly complicated in any way – so why is the deterministic position so prevalent? It would be silly to watch a biologist denying the existence of life, or a psychologist denying the existence of consciousness, or a physicist denying the existence of matter and energy – so why do so many determinists try to convince others that changing minds is impossible?

Many studies show that human consciousness sometimes engages in what is called ex post facto reasoning – justifying prior decisions after the fact using reasons unconnected with the decision. Brain scans can sometimes detect a decision in the mind before the subject becomes consciously aware of having made a decision. The subject later creates “reasons” for that decision. (For more information on this – as well as detailed sources – please check out my presentation “The Death of Reason,” available on YouTube.)

All this is held up triumphantly by the determinists, who say, “Ahah! People only think they make a choice; therefore, free will is a delusion!”

It certainly is true that people can nimbly navigate through challenging conceptual mazes using their instincts. Think of a prisoner being interrogated by the police, or a family member being confronted about some past immorality – the levels of obfuscation and misdirection can be truly powerful in such situations.

These manipulative instincts arise from deep within the brain, and are not often explainable by the conscious mind.

If you have ever watched a really good jazz quartet, you’ve witnessed when they decide to improvise. No individual musician knows exactly what note they are going to play next, yet the music all works together beautifully.

If you know how to fluently read a second language that you learned as an adult, and you glance at some text in that language, you automatically – or instinctually – comprehend what you are reading.

Would the determinists then say that you have no choice regarding your comprehension?

Of course you do – because you made a choice to learn to read that second language.

While it is true that it is hard to look at the text of a language you know and not understand it – you might say impossible – this is not where free will resides.

If I am playing a top-seeded tennis player, I do not have the capacity to will a victory, since his skill and training vastly exceeds my own.

However, if I have been training hard for fifteen years, then my will might come into play – if I decide to grit my teeth and push through some exhaustion.

Do you see? I don’t have the choice to swim to shore if I don’t know how to swim. I don’t have the choice to sing Mozart’s Requiem if I have never studied the music – or I lack the voice.

Sure, it is true that some people lack choices in life – but that is often, or least sometimes, due to their prior choices. If I have practised running for many years, I may have the choice to outrun a fast mugger. If I have spent most of my time sitting on the couch, I don’t have that choice. If I saved my money in the past, I have the choice to spend it in the present – if I did not, I don’t.

This is not to argue that prior choices provide omnipotence, but prior choices either expand or narrow our range of opportunities in the future. If I exercise regularly, I can play sports relatively easily – that gives me more choices. However, while I am exercising, I am not able to play the cello, and therefore my choices are reduced. Some diminished choices in the present create expanded choices in the future – and indeed, all choices in the present diminish other present choices – or eliminate them. Some choices in the present, such as not learning the guitar, reduce choices in the future – playing guitar.

A series of choices – combined with happenstance – may lead to you having only one real course of action. Let us say that you are a drug addict, and a dangerous criminal sees you stealing his drugs. I think it’s fair to say that in such a situation, your plethora of choices is somewhat reduced – run like mad, get someplace safe or get out of town. As you pant down the alleyway, your heart pounding, you may believe you have no free will – and in the moment, it’s hard to argue that you have a lot of options. However, your narrowed opportunities in the present, at least in part, result from your bad choices in the past – the choice to take drugs, the choice to keep taking drugs, the choice to steal the drugs, and so on.

If you jump out of a plane, you don’t have the choice not to fall – your choice to jump has reduced your other choices considerably.

Pointing out that some people have few if any choices does not disprove the concept of free will, any more than pointing out that some people are sick disproves the concept of health. In fact, pointing out that some people have reduced choices only reinforces the concept of free will, just as pointing out that some people are sick only reinforces the concept of health – we only know they are sick because we have the concept of health.

Sure, some choices reduce future choices, but that does not deny free will – it actually makes our examination of our choices all the more important. Some health choices, such as smoking, also reduce future choices. This does not mean that choices do not matter, but that they are actually more important than we sometimes think.

Self-Knowledge Versus Determinism

Generally, it is not enough to disprove a common belief – we must also find a way to explain its prevalence. Determinism is not a valid position, but it certainly feels true to a great number of people, and that is something well worth examining.

A famous “first commandment” in philosophy – often attributed to Socrates – is: Know thyself.

What is meant by this, and why is it so important?

We are creatures of reason and self-reflection, to some degree, but we are more specifically – and more importantly – creatures of action.

If you have ever played a sport or an instrument at a very high level, you know the importance of trained instincts – to be able to think something and then achieve it, virtually instantaneously. A tennis player wants to place a ball in a particular place, at a particular speed, with a particular spin – and he has mere milliseconds to achieve this. A pianist jams with a group of experts; they must all think and breathe and play as one.

Anyone can hit a ball with a bat, or pound away noisily on a piano – the question is, how well?

Becoming an expert first requires understanding that you are not an expert, and then understanding how long it takes to become an expert – the enormous difference between being ignorant and competent. Then, countless hours and years of practice are required to achieve expertise.

To observers, the feats that experts can achieve often seem miraculous. A golf pro digs a ball out of a sand trap and sinks the putt; musicians nod at each other and change the entire key and beat of a song – it all seems amazing.

Some feats involve achieving expertise from a neutral starting place, and others involve achieving normalcy from a negative starting place.

A man with a healthy body may become a gold-medal runner – and a man with a broken body may become a regular walker. Both endeavours may take as much time, blood, sweat and tears – the broken man struggles for years to get to the place that the expert runner started from.

If we were raised rationally, the feats we would be able to achieve with our minds, bodies and spirits would be beyond the comprehension of the world as it stands.

However, we are generally not raised rationally – we are raised anti-rationally. So many of us are deprived of the maternal care, proximity and comfort we deserve and desire as babies. So many of us are dumped in daycare and raised without fathers. We are frightened, bullied and dumbed down in government schools, propagandized in universities, lied to by the media – and programmed by superstition, guilt, rage and shame. It is remarkable that we emerge as adults with the capacity to put one foot in front of the other.

We have no capacity to return to our original, unharmed humanity – any more than a man who struggles for years to get out of a wheelchair can be the same as a man who was never in a wheelchair. Recognizing how broken we were – and often are – by culture, control, coercion and circumstance is a necessary prerequisite for the beginning of wisdom. A three-year-old pounds on a xylophone and turns in pride at the “music” he has created, and we clap, perhaps too indulgently. One of the turning points in parenting is recognizing when our praise is no longer generating enthusiasm, but delusion. We praise a toddler for walking, because the toddler could not walk before. We clap relative to the child’s lack of ability in the past, but if we continue clapping, we strip the enthusiasm for achievement in the future. What originates as a form of motivation becomes a form of paralysis.

Returning to rationality is an arduous, multiyear, painful process. The benefit is that you become a friend to yourself and to the truth, but a stranger to your society. Achieving sanity reveals the insanity of your environment. The light of reason illuminates the madhouse around you.

You are programmed – as I was programmed – to serve the needs of those who rule us. You are raised by the government to praise the government, and to fear freedom. Government schools teach you that the danger in your life comes from your peers, not the school itself, even though you are generally forced to be there. If you are unjustly put in a dangerous prison, the true source of the danger is the corrupt legal system, not your fellow inmates; they are a side effect, not the first cause.

By placing you in age-segregated confinement among a subset of traumatized and aggressive children, schools teach you very quickly that peers are dangerous and that teachers are needed to control bullying.

Thus, we grow up with the perception that we must fear our peers most of all, and run to authority for salvation and protection. We must fear our peers even as they grow into adults. However, it doesn’t take a lot of logical analysis to ask the basic question: If the government is so good at educating children, why must we fear our peers as adults?

We are constantly told by the government that we are in danger – not from the state, of course, which taxes and conscripts us, starts wars and buries us in national debts – but from our fellow citizens. Without the state, we are told, we will be overrun by the insanity and evil of those around us – but the state is also somehow legitimized by the votes of the insane and evil around us.

If you do not explore and understand how you have been programmed, you are little more than a machine. You have no free will of any real consequence. You remain a useful idiot serving as an empty soldier in the baying brain-dead army of the masses. The mob clamours for temporary free stuff at the expense of permanent freedoms and attacks anyone who suggests that real freedom and moral responsibility are infinitely better than the soft enslavement of state dependence.

If you lack self-knowledge – if you lack the basic understanding of how you have been turned into a machine that serves the state, into a subspecies of tax livestock that serves politicians – then how can you claim to have any real understanding of freedom, let alone free will?

If you were raised badly, then you were conditioned by your parents to serve their dysfunctional needs, rather than the truth, integrity, honesty or any of the other basic virtues in life. When you are asked to judge the ethics of those in authority – or the ethics of authoritarianism in general – you recoil from the task, for fear of offending the dangerous inner alter egos implanted in your mind by your parents. You were punished for approaching the truth as a child, and so you avoid the truth as an adult – just like any trained animal, just as a puppy avoids pooping inside because it fears the rolled-up magazine.

If you live your life in compliance to internal programming, to avoidance of disapproval – and in fear of the laughable crime of “giving offense” – then you have no real freedom at all, no capacity to make choices independent of, or in opposition to, your programming.

You are little more than a useful robot running around in preprogrammed spirals, spewing polysyllabic nonsense designed to prop up the gallows of power.

If you don’t examine your programming, your programming becomes your physics – as absolute and unchangeable as the laws of material reality.

This is true if you are from what is called the Left, or what is called the Right. This is true if you are religious or an atheist. This is true if you are a Buddhist or a Zoroastrian. If you inherit preprinted ideologies without reference to philosophy, you have no free will to speak of.

Do you think you are free because you have the right to speak and to vote?

You can be consulted only because your responses are determined in advance. You are allowed to vote only because your vote is almost completely predictable. You are allowed the illusion of freedom, only because you will most likely never exercise the real thing.

If you live in a primitive village at the bottom of a volcano and you are told that an angry fire god lives at the top of the volcano, who will destroy anyone who approaches his home, and you believe this with all your heart, are you free to climb the volcano?

If you believe that society will collapse without a particular government program, are you free to rationally evaluate that government program?

If you believe that holding a particular moral position will ensure that you never get a date, are you really free to publicly hold that moral position?

If you believe that the poor will starve and the sick will die without government healthcare and welfare, are you really free to examine free market solutions to charity and healthcare?

If you believe that only evil people believe x, are you free to believe x? Are you free to even dispassionately examine and evaluate x?

If you are told that it is healthy and right for an abused woman to leave her boyfriend, do you think that is a reasonable and good position?

If you are told that it is healthy and right for the adult victim of child abuse to leave his abusive parent, do you think that is a reasonable and good position?

If you are told that you live in a rape culture, where rape is minimized or denied, and then later you are told that the FBI did not even classify rape against men as a crime until 2012, what do you say?^[2]

Are you beginning to see just how fenced in you really are?

At some deep level, we all know this, which is why we avoid the topic of freedom – and in particular philosophical freedom, which is the reality, possibility and opportunity of true free will.

True free will must be earned, because it has been stolen.

When someone says you have free will, but you know you have not done the necessary work to escape your programmed delusions, what they say often seems both outlandish and humiliating to you. It seems outlandish because you know it is not true for you. And it feels humiliating because you know deep down that you should have done that work, the work needed to become free, the work to undo your programming, the work to shatter delusions, and to move from livestock to human, from robot to free mind.

Also, if you become free, what happens to your relationships with your surrounding slaves?

Determinism and a History of Evil

There may be other, more sinister reasons why somebody might be emotionally invested in the position of determinism.

Imagine you have done some truly vile deed – something illegal, or at least deeply immoral.

If you believe you had a choice and voluntarily did evil, how do you live with yourself?

Christianity has a lot to say about this, as do many other religions. You must first admit that you chose to do the evil, you must accept your guilt, and finally you must strive with all of your might to make amends.

You must beg for forgiveness, you must pay restitution, you must make the person you wronged whole again. If this means going broke, if this means confessing to the authorities, if this means accepting a prison sentence, then this is what you must do.

However – what if you really, really don’t want to do any of that?

In that case, you have a number of psychological strategies at your disposal to avoid the unpleasant but necessary task of humbling yourself before your wrongdoing.

You can tell yourself that your victims deserved it. If you stole, well, a fool and his money are soon parted. If you assaulted someone, he picked the fight. If you sexually assaulted someone, well, she was just asking for it – the list goes on and on, in dismal descending repetition.

You can tell yourself there is no such thing as right and wrong, that everyone takes what they want, and only fools and weaklings deny the full manifestation of their own desires. You can console yourself with Nietzsche and thoughts of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and other world-striding malefactors. You can become an angry-will nihilist, charging through life in search of diminishing dopamine, and scorning any who deny the full scope of their lusts.

You can read the novel Crime and Punishment and sympathize with the murderer.

If you are a sadist, you can take giggling pleasure in the discomfort, upset and pain you cause others, viewing life as a fun game of extracting giddy agony from idiots.

If you are psychotic, you can believe you are sent on a mission by disembodied voices, aiming to heal some catastrophic world divide with the regretfully necessary brutality of your actions.

Or – or, you can become a determinist.

If you are a determinist, there can be no preferred states in your world view. Determinism is not the establishment of truth, but the destruction of the very concept of truth. Truth is a preferred state – preferable to falsehood – however, if everyone and everything is a machine, there can be no preferred states, since no alternative possibilities can exist. A rock lands where a rock lands – the rock has no preferred state. Everything is the inevitable clockwork unrolling of mere physics – there is no right and wrong, no truth and falsehood, no good and evil – these are all primitive superstitions, akin to a belief not in the geological reality of a volcano, but the imaginary superstition of a volcano god.

I have had countless debates with determinists over the course of my career as a public intellectual, and every single time, I have had the feeling – and yes, this is not an argument – that we are really only dancing around the core issue, which always remains unspoken. The titanic amount of emotional resistance I receive from determinists when exploring these issues is a tragic force of nature. They literally will not let go of their perspectives and positions, and it is impossible for me to shake the feeling that we are never approaching the core of what is really going on.

Think about it – why would someone so desperately need to believe that there is no such thing as right or wrong, truth or falsehood, good or evil, personal responsibility, morality, the capacity for love and respect and courage and integrity? What possible motivation could there be for someone to burn from the universe all that glory and joy and possibility? How much horror must they have experienced – or inflicted – in order to call in an airstrike on everything that makes life worth living, everything that gives us meaning, everything that gives us responsibility and self-respect, pride and love, motivation and responsibility?

I think determinists actually understand deep down how much they are giving up to maintain the position that mankind is a mere bag of meaty mechanized muscle.

My question has always been: Why would they want to give up so much?

The answer cannot be, “Because it is true!” The determinist position denies the very concept of truth or falsehood. If the determinist is right, he believes in determinism involuntarily – and I believe in free will involuntarily. It’s like dropping a boulder on the knife edge of a peaked mountaintop – it breaks, and one half of the boulder falls one way while the other falls the other way. Is there any choice involved? Of course not! Would it make any sense to stand at the open door of the helicopter and scream at one half of the boulder that it was travelling in the wrong direction, that it needed to reverse course, climb back over the mountain and join the other half crashing in that direction? These would be the actions of a crazy person, but in the deterministic universe, there is actually no difference between the split rock and the human mind.

Of course, the determinist can say that he is predetermined to debate with me and to try and change my mind, and therefore he can do nothing about his actions – and here we get to the very heart and crux of the issue.

The determinist essentially says: “Everything I do is right.”

In the deterministic universe, there is no such thing as an incorrect choice, an unpreferred position, or the rational capacity to criticize anyone. If I write a computer program and it fails to compile, I don’t blame the computer, my keyboard or the monitor – that would be ridiculous and immature.

By turning himself into a computer, the determinist renders himself above and beyond any real criticism at all. He is beyond good and evil.

It seems like hard science, but it is in fact “soft snowflake.”

If I prove the determinist wrong, he can just shrug and say, Well, I guess that was predetermined.

If the determinist has acted in an immoral manner, he can just shrug and say, Well, I guess that was predetermined.

The position is one of rank and deep self-hatred – it is a troll’s position. It is a dark dare to join the determinist in an empty universe of clanking machinery, a lack of identity, a lack of meaning, a lack of virtue, a lack of love – it is an invitation to a walking suicide of value.

It is an invitation to free yourself from conscience by destroying your capacity for choice.

But – what virtuous person wants to be freed from his own conscience?

Love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous. In the deterministic universe, there is no virtue; therefore, there can be no love.

Integrity is fidelity to moral truth. In the deterministic universe, there is no truth; therefore, there can be no morality and, therefore, there can be no integrity.

Courage is choosing what is right over what is popular. In the deterministic universe, since there is no such thing as “right,” there can be no such thing as courage.

We could go on and on down the list of virtues, all of which in the deterministic universe would be wiped out, irradiated and erased.

It is a cold, lifeless world empty of value, truth, goodness, compassion, charity or love – it is a world of machines, and you are one of them. Nothing can be changed, nothing can be preferred, and nothing can be won or lost. We are all just lifeless boulders rolling down the side of a mountain into an inevitable grave.

What personal hell must you have experienced – or created – to be even remotely tempted by such a nightmarish position?

Determinism and Emotional Investment

I am fully aware that my charge of “emotional investment” could very easily be turned back on me. I openly accept that and have talked about it publicly many times. If I ask people, “Why are you so emotionally invested in determinism?” they can very fairly ask me the same question – “Why are you so emotionally invested in free will?”

Here we can talk about the unspoken risks of determinism.

Falsely believing in determinism can strip you of love, life, value, enthusiasm, courage – all the most wonderful aspects of human existence – and this risk is rarely talked about when confronting the question of determinism.

If you are a determinist, you will probably do little to protect your values – while those who accept free will strive mightily to advance theirs. If you are an atheist and a determinist, you will lose – your entire belief system will lose – in the endless back-and-forth tussle of physical and intellectual human combat. This helps us understand why less rational belief systems are spreading and growing throughout the world, while the West falters and fails.

Through relentless materialism and secularism, we have created generations of deterministic, nihilistic, socialistic and empty atheists and agnostics – and now we are losing our freedoms. Determinists lose to those who believe in free will, because determinism is a false position, and it undermines our desire to maintain our hard-won freedoms. What is the point of political freedoms, if we don’t even have free will? Would you sign a petition to grant human rights to a rock garden? Would you fight for the right for a statue to do yoga? Would you march and protest to give your smartphone the right to vote?

Bad reason is worse than good faith. A priest who gives you good medicine is better than a doctor who gives you bad medicine.

The danger of the determinist position is that by not believing in free will, our capacity to exercise free will is destroyed.

I am willing to give up deeply held positions if the reasoned arguments are sufficient, and if the evidence overwhelmingly supports the new position. I was a socialist, a Christian, an Objectivist, and now I have moved beyond those positions – although I treasured them greatly at the time – because accumulated reason and evidence have overwhelmed my original beliefs.

However, I cannot rationally change my mind about my capacity to change my mind. I cannot use my capacity to choose to deny my capacity to choose. I cannot use free will to deny free will.

The fact that accepting the determinist position would also strip my life of love, passion, meaning, purpose and joy is a purely emotional argument – I understand that. And such a sandblasting of happiness is not at all a rational counterargument, but I bring it up as something I am emotionally aware of, and to give you, the dear reader and listener, the honesty of a fair evaluation of my emotional state.

I am also fully aware that a deeply religious person could reject arguments for atheism on the same basis – that a cold and godless universe would be emotionally devastating. I would genuinely respect a religious person for making this honest statement, since most arguments – particularly about epistemology and ethics – are mere covers for deeply held emotional preferences. When we admit and discuss our emotional investments in our positions, we do not become less rational, but rather more rational, since honesty is required for productive intellectual debate – and honesty about bias is a confession of a dedication to rationality.

Should determinism be established beyond doubt, I would no longer be able to comprehend my being, my identity, what it means to be human.

Imagine how strange it would be to know that every single thought, every single impulse, every single “decision” was not yours – that you imagined you were the pilot of an aircraft, when it turned out you were not even a passenger, but merely the machinery of the engine.

Can you imagine waking up in a world where everyone was a robot, and no one had a choice – including you?

Can you imagine waking up in a world where there were no such things as a conscience, virtue, love, courage or truth – a world where all these preferred states were mere delusions, and you faced a bleak and listless future, with about as much choice and freedom as a pinball ricocheting between various preprogrammed bumpers?

Can you imagine waking up in a world where no one had any responsibility whatsoever? In an old John Cleese comedy called Fawlty Towers, the main character beats his uncooperative car with a tree branch. This crazed immaturity is funny, because he is basically punishing an inanimate object, a mere machine. His frustration, of course, is with his own preprogrammed reactions – with his expectations of ease, which are constantly violated by an inevitably messy reality – but we do not imagine that the car can do anything to appease such a madman.

Can you imagine waking up in a world where it made about as much sense to correct or punish a wrongdoer as it does to hit a broken car with a tree branch? We do not give a medal to the rock that rolls down the hill the fastest, so why would we give a medal to the fastest runner in a deterministic universe? The rock is indistinguishable from the runner, philosophically speaking.

Can you imagine waking up in a world where accepting determinism caused you to change your behaviour, to advocate different things, to oppose various perspectives – all while accepting that you had no capacity to do any of these things?

Can you imagine waking up in a world where you could never do anything wrong? Where you could never make a mistake, where you could never be in error, and where you could never be immoral?

Can you imagine being the kind of person, with the kind of history, who would thirst so deeply for such empty salvation?

Can you imagine having done such wrong that you were desperate for absolution, for forgiveness – but still being so corrupt that you would not lift a finger to earn it?

Can you imagine being so guilty that you would destroy love, choice, virtue itself, in order to pretend you did nothing wrong?

Can you imagine being so corrupt that you would spread the nihilistic doctrine of determinism, hoping to gain misery in company, rather than seeking peace through restitution to those you have wronged?

Can you imagine being so solitary, so isolated, so existentially lonely, that you would choose to empty the universe of consciousness rather than seek comfort from another human being?

I can’t, and I never want to.

Morality and the Elements

Now we turn to the heart of philosophy, which is morality.

The purpose of medicine is physical health; the purpose of nutrition is digestive health. All the research, theory, scientific examination, testing and writing in these fields are designed with one, and only one, objective in mind: to get you to change your behaviour.

There is little point in buying a diet book if you do not change your diet. The cliché of the exercise machine ordered with high enthusiasm at 2:00 a.m. that ends up gathering dust under your guest bed fits this pattern as well. There is no point in learning how to exercise if you never bother exercising. There is no point going to the doctor and getting a prescription, if you never end up taking the medicine.

The purpose of all knowledge is to change behaviour. We study piano in order to improve our piano playing, we learn how to cook so we can cook better, we diet and exercise in order to become healthier. We study another language to better speak that language. We learn how to use a computer so that we can achieve our goals more efficiently. Why do we check the weather? In order to change our behaviour – bring an umbrella, apply sunscreen, whatever.

There was an old video recording and playback technology called the VCR – you can still buy the machines online. Imagine getting ahold of a very early VCR – and then learning how it had been programmed. It might be possible to either get the source code – sitting on some dusty 5¼-inch  floppy disk somewhere – or reverse-engineer the VCR code. Then imagine spending months learning that code, studying the hardware specifications and capacities of the machine, and finding some way to improve its speed, efficiency or responsiveness. Then perhaps you could find some way to inject that new code into an existing ancient VCR and watch it perform better. I can’t fathom why anyone would ever pursue that goal, because it would be a dismal and useless waste of time, for many obvious reasons.

It might be possible to justify such a hobby on the grounds that it sharpens your mind, gives you skills that might benefit you in the future, or something along those lines. But I think it would be reasonable to say that anyone who spent hundreds of hours on this pursuit might be exhibiting signs of some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder or other kind of mental imbalance.

If you were told today that you had three months to live, would you immediately start studying a difficult foreign language?

A subculture of programmers has devoted themselves to the task of getting the old video game Doom to run on a variety of platforms, including printers and cell phones and other disparate hardware.

In this case, I can only assume they are pursuing the respect of others in their subculture, along with the immediate dopamine hit of getting code to run on something that wasn’t designed to run it. There is a purpose in what they do, and the test is whether they post their successes publicly. If you found some man with a variety of ancient hardware in his garage, who had spent the last five years getting an old video game to run on everything from a scientific calculator to a monochrome printer interface, but had never told anyone of his strenuous endeavours, and never used his acquired skills anywhere else, wouldn’t that be a sign that he was pretty nuts?

Intense effort without payoff, without benefit, is a sign of mental illness – like a man endlessly organizing useless items, or a woman obsessively washing her hands, or a child spending eight hours building and breaking one particular toy – these are all signs that all is not well in the upstairs chambers.

I bring all this up because I’m sure you are at least vaguely aware of the enormous efforts that have been poured into philosophy just over the past century or so, and how little productive and valuable meaning has come out of it – at least for the average individual.

Quick – tell me what moral principles have come out of existentialism, postmodernism, pragmatism, collectivism, relativism, or even socialism or Marxism or fascism. Have any of these ideologies or philosophies helped you make better moral decisions in your daily life? I am not talking about political activism, but the personal moral challenges we all face.

Generally, vague positive effects are claimed. Philosophy “enriches” and “deepens understanding” and “brings wisdom” – which are all unquantifiable positives that generally accrue only to the individual.

Philosophy is not just about making you feel better, but about making the world better as well.

When people are generally competent in the science of nutrition, the need for nutritionists diminishes.

When people become generally competent in philosophy, the need for philosophers will diminish.

Gaining significant expertise in nutrition comes with a reasonable expectation that you will instruct the ignorant.

Becoming competent in philosophy also comes with a reasonable expectation that you will instruct the ignorant.

Even philosophies that claim to pursue the moral good rarely result in positive changes in personal behaviour.

There are philosophies that advocate for government control of healthcare. Do they directly help you make better decisions to become a healthier person? Quite the opposite – if healthcare is “free,” people are more likely to neglect their health.

If you think of the philosophy of collectivism – that the group should rule over the individual – it is not designed to help you make better decisions in your own life, but rather to surrender your own decision-making capacity to the mob.

If you think of relativism – the argument that claims as true the position that there is no such thing as truth – how does that help you make moral decisions in your daily life?

Being a Marxist may encourage you to spend your time attempting to establish a dictatorship to transfer control of the means of production to the state, but how does that goal help you make better moral decisions today, tomorrow or ever?

The philosophy of pragmatism may encourage you to judge an idea by its effects, rather than by its principles, but it does not help you make any better moral decisions today – it generally encourages you to act randomly and judge the results over time. I can’t imagine that a diet book called Eat Randomly: See If You Get Thin! would ever sell well. A book on ethics called Kill Today, See How You Feel Tomorrow! would not be particularly ethical.

The general slogan that praises “the greatest good for the greatest number” does not help you in your own particular life. It is designed, of course, to get you to vote for more and more government power, since collective benefits can in general only be secured and enforced by the coercive might of a centralized state.

Such philosophies are either designed to make ethics murky, confusing and messy, or they are designed to get you to vote for bigger and bigger government – they are not designed to help you make better moral decisions in your own life today.

Compare this to Christianity – the Ten Commandments are not collectivist in nature, but are aimed directly at the individual and his or her own moral choices. The question “What would Jesus do?” is specifically designed to evoke a personal reaction in a moment of moral crisis, to help the individual pattern himself after the most moral being in the universe. The Bible consistently exhorts people to pursue virtue individually in their daily lives, using personal decisions – it doesn’t just tell people to vote for a politician who is going to enforce some kind of collective and coercive “good.”

You do good in order to get to heaven. Your conscience is your own and cannot be outsourced to anyone else – any other mob, group, collective, politician or government. In fact, Christianity directly warns people of the danger of the mob and of the necessity for individual salvation. Your conscience is responsible to virtue, and you can no more outsource your moral responsibility than you can ask someone else to digest your food for you.

Once you have saved yourself, then you can save others. Put the airplane oxygen mask on your own face first.

The destruction of individual conscience that grew out of Darwinism, materialism, socialism and atheism was one of the greatest catastrophes ever to hit Western civilization – in fact, it has been the persistent undoing of Western civilization ever since.

The Storm and the Self: An Analogy

Imagine a dark village battered by a terrible storm – only the walls of the village church hold strong. All who venture outside risk sudden death, but all who take shelter inside the church are safe. The villagers all huddle inside, singing, praying and sharing food.

Into the village, through the storm, rides a group of atheists. Dismounting, they pull out sledgehammers, cry out that there is no God, swarm up the wet walls and start pounding on the roof of the church, tearing it away. The storm, the hail, the wind, the debris – all begin flying into the church and smashing into the people. As the steeple collapses, lightning strikes the cross, jumps through the water and electrocutes some of the panicked congregation.

In the hellish storm, with the atheists tearing open the roof, it becomes more dangerous inside the church than outside, in the devilish elements. The villagers, crying out in terror, stream out of the dying church and into the rain-lashed landscape, dodging flying tree branches and rolling rocks. The atheists, after having completed their destruction of the church, gather the villagers before them.

“You can thank us now, for we have saved you from your superstition!” cries the leader of the atheists.

“The storm is raging, and getting worse. Where on earth do we go now? Where do we take shelter?” demand the villagers, covering their children with their own bodies, chilled to the bone, cut and broken by flying debris, shaking and terrified and enraged.

The atheists simply smile and charge off into the storm, looking for another church to tear apart.

And what happens to the villagers?

I think we all know.

We are seeing it play out every single day across the Western world. The storm gets worse, the violence increases, and the church – which sheltered not just the villagers, but their entire civilization – lies in ruin.

Let us say that the church as an institution is wrong. There are certainly good philosophical arguments to make in that direction – but so what?

If you are a decent, moral humanbeing, you do not tear down the only structure that shelters the people from storms, without providing them a better place to take refuge.

And you sure as hell do not tear down their shelter during a storm.

If you despise the existing shelter, build a better shelter, and people will arrive of their own accord.

The most fundamental question I have asked of myself recently, and of my own history with atheism, is this: Do atheists love the truth, or do they merely hate the church?

The state is the great competitor to religion. Christianity aims to prevent crime – the state aims to “cure” it. Think of the difference between a nutritionist and a surgeon. Often, the more influence the nutritionist has, the less work there is for the surgeon.

You can have a big God and a small state, or you can have a small God and a big state – the pendulum of society seems to irrevocably swing back and forth between the two in this tragic manner.

Those who wish to grow the power of the state know the church stands directly in their path. Transferring the allegiance of the citizenry from the worship of God to a worship of the state requires that God be discredited; the state inevitably takes its place. For well over a century, atheists have savagely dismantled the church, religious faith, the conscience, the conception of sin, and a fear of the afterlife.

The Marxists say that religion is the opiate of the masses – modernity reveals that Marxism is the opiate of the anti-religious.

The church was the traditional moral home of Western civilization, amid the perpetual storm of intertribal and international conflicts that is the world. Atheists tore down the church because they claimed to love truth and found religion false.

Did the atheists – and do the atheists – love truth?

By far the greatest threat to human life – at least in the twentieth century – came from the state, not from religion. In that most dismal hundred-year span, governments murdered two hundred and fifty million of their own citizens. This horrifying figure does not even include wars.

This is a basic truth of history – states have murdered hundreds of millions of people in a single hundred-year span.

Society needs to be organized, people need to follow rules – the traditional organization in the West that provided these things was based on Christianity.

When Christianity – and the rules it engendered – was torn down by the atheists, what did they erect to protect the people?

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

They tore down the church and sold the people to the state.

I am increasingly of the opinion that atheists were useful idiots used to destroy the church that stood in the path of the power mongers, who thirsted to expand the brutal strength of the state.

I am telling you all of this before I introduce you to a rational proof of secular ethics, because I was – and remain – deeply shocked by the hostility and indifference shown by atheists to such a proof.

The destruction of Christian ethics created a power vacuum in society that was filled by increasing state power. Atheists hated being influenced by the voluntary participation of Christianity – but seem to have no problem being controlled by the coercive power of the state.

Atheists rail against the automatic guilt of original sin, but seem to have far fewer objections to the automatic guilt of “racism,” “sexism,” “patriarchy,” “misogyny” – and all the other slanderous attack-labels of the encroaching left.

What were atheists as a whole selling to the general public, or at least the intellectual public?

Were they selling a new moral goal that would supersede and transcend religious imperatives? Were they combining a hatred of irrationality and coercion that would culminate in opposition to the increasing size and power of the state?

Of course not.

Becoming an atheist released people from moral obligations. It removed the all-seeing eye of God, the strictness of moral integrity, and the requirement to sacrifice the immediate self to a higher purpose.

What moral rules – what strictness, what requirements for self-discipline, self-subjugation and integrity – did atheism provide?

Where atheism overlapped with Marxism – or at least socialism – there were larger goals as a whole: increasing the size and power of the state and its capacity to control resources and redistribute income – but that strikes me as a particularly satanic goal.

Did Marxists deny religion out of a deep opposition to irrational beliefs? Of course not – reason and evidence have denied the truth and virtue of Marxism, but many Marxists have just abandoned reason and evidence rather than give up their irrational beliefs. (Hence postmodernism.)

Did Marxists oppose capitalism because they care about the poor? Of course not – free markets have freed and enriched the poor; Marxism impoverished and enslaved them.

Did Marxists oppose existing governments because those governments were oppressive and tyrannical? Of course not – Marxist governments are far more oppressive and tyrannical.

Marxism is the mere manifestation of a post-Darwinian lust for power and resources. Christianity stands between the Marxists and the tyranny they thirst for; therefore, Christianity must go.

For Christians, poverty in this life may be a precursor to an eternity in heaven after death. As the Bible saying goes, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Poverty is not a desperate problem to be solved by any means necessary – many devout Christians embrace poverty.

For atheists, since there is no afterlife, the problem of poverty becomes far greater. A poor man does not get his reward after death; he just suffers a miserable life, then dies. More secular philosophies such as socialism and communism tend to focus on material inequality far more than Christianity – as Jesus says, the poor will always be with us.

Since it accepts material inequality, Christianity is far freer to focus on fundamental principles – equality of opportunity, rather than equality of outcome; a commandment that says thou shalt not steal, rather than a law demanding forced income redistribution.

Christianity also focuses on achieving virtue by rejecting materialism and power over others. The devil tempts Jesus by offering him the whole world – Jesus rejects him. As the Bible says, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

For atheists, a man has no soul to lose, so it is far more tempting to demand that the state serve the material needs of the population, rather than reinforce the population’s spiritual and moral virtues. A material focus leads to a fundamental problem, however. If the state forcibly transfers income, it cannot at the same time maintain property rights – the two positions are antithetical. Secular governments increasingly shift from “thou shalt not” to “thou shalt” – a far less free position.

Human beings are strongly primed by nature to desire violent power over others. Even bonobo monkeys, when they climb the hierarchy of tribal power, receive increased dopamine hits deep in their brains, which incentivize them to become even better at subjugating other monkeys. Offering political power to human beings is like offering cocaine to a desperate addict – the addict has a plan, sure, but we would not describe it as a very noble or elevated plan.

Political power requires the initiation of force against citizens.

Plotting to gain, keep and increase political power is deeply immoral. Whether consciously or not, atheists have helped open the gates of hell to endless escalations of state power. They have been foot soldiers in the great stampede of evildoers to gain control of and expand political power – the power of coercion.

This is, of course, a hypothesis – but it is a testable hypothesis.

Do atheists tend toward leftism? They certainly do. In one study, atheists are almost seven times more likely to support the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party in the United States. From Pew Research:

“About two-thirds of atheists (69%) identify as Democrats (or lean in that direction), and a majority (56%) call themselves political liberals (compared with just one-in-ten who say they are conservatives).”^[3]

Do atheists recognize that the initiation of force is far more immoral than any possible personal irrationality? They certainly do not, since they consistently attack Christianity, and consistently defend the state. For adults, Christianity is voluntary, and there are no penalties for leaving the faith – state commandments and laws are not voluntary, and can result in prison sentences for disobedience.

If atheists were generally concerned with the philosophical and moral improvement of the human race, they would have restrained their base attacks on Christianity until they, as atheists, were able to provide a rational and objective moral framework to help society become more reasonable and good, rather than merely tear down the church and expose a desperate and frightened population to all the raw and destructive elements pouring down from the black skies of history.

A moral atheistic philosophy would have said this:

“Well, a byproduct of disproving God will be the undoing of Christian ethics – but society needs ethics, so we better hold off unraveling the central moral fabric of our societies until we have something better to take its place. Even if Christianity is an irrational painkiller, the population is certainly in pain, and withdrawing the painkiller without providing an alternative is mere sadism. So, let us put our heads together, start from scratch, and build a system of ethics from the ground up, making sure every step is complete and cohesive, and then work our mighty intellectual and verbal muscles to trumpet a rational system of secular ethics from the rooftops, so that the people do not dissolve into confusion, depression, materialism and hedonism.”

This they did not do.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

They said: “Christianity is irrational and ridiculous and destructive, so away with these false superstitions and contradictory edicts, away with this hierarchy, punishment and guilt-tripping and all other sorts of nonsense. Let us merely oppose the irrational, rather than build the truly rational.”

If atheists were truly moral – even if they had overlooked the need for generally accepted social ethics – they would surely have cheered the introduction of a rational proof of secular ethics. Doing so would provide a moral framework outside of religion and above the mere coercive powers of state law. This would provide the people with shelter from the storms of the world and an objective framework by which to organize their lives, their decisions, and the larger decisions of society as a whole.

However, in the decade or so that I have introduced my rational proof of secular ethics, atheists have been supremely indifferent – and occasionally hostile – to the argument.

Think of a village in a near-infinite desert, with a single murky spring for water. Atheists find the brackish spring objectionable – “The water is not pure!” – and destroy it. The people start dying of thirst. The atheists say that they want people to be good and healthy and happy, but they do nothing to find an alternate water source. A man starts delivering water from an unknown location, but rather than find its source, the atheists merely tell everyone that the man is crazy, and that his water is poisoned, and they should shun him.

These atheists are condemning the villagers to a slow and ugly death.

What is their purpose?

Is it not to cause and watch human suffering?

Is it not also true that the atheists shall die of thirst in turn?

It is fine and good to want to improve a water supply, but to destroy an existing water supply for its imperfections without providing new water is neither fine nor good. Furthermore, when fresh, clean water becomes available, to scare the villagers into avoiding it is a grim manifestation of selfish sadism.

The power vacuum created by the destruction of Christian ethics in society will be filled either by reason or by violence. By failing to pursue a rational substitution for Christian ethics – and by damning and attacking those who have – atheists have merely served the state, and they will, I believe, be condemned by history.

The old alliance between communism and atheism has been regularly mocked by atheists, without fruitful examination. Why has totalitarianism constantly sought to erase religion? Saying Hitler was an atheist and Stalin was an atheist – but that their atheism was about as relevant to their ideologies as their moustaches – does not help or aid a deeper examination of any potential causality.

Universally Preferable Behaviour

If I were a nutritionist, I would tell you all about the science, biology and chemistry of food and digestion – with the express goal, at the end, of convincing you to change your dietary habits in order to improve your well-being.

If I were a personal trainer, I would tell you all about the science and biology and chemistry of stretching and exercise – with the express goal, at the end, of convincing you to change your exercise habits.

My goal in this book is to give you the background, knowledge and expertise to understand the value and purpose of philosophy, which is to get you to change your moral habits.

The purpose of medical research is to provide knowledge that leads to the prevention or cure of disease. There is no purpose in engaging in medical research if no one ends up changing any behaviours based upon the results of that research.

The entire purpose of a smoking cessation program is to have you not pick up a cigarette, light it, and suck on it. Going over the medical, biological and genetic background as to the dangers of smoking is all very important, but it is important only insofar as it helps reinforce your willpower to refrain from smoking that cigarette.

Everything in philosophy comes down to you changing your moral habits – and changing your moral habits requires a deep understanding of the value of good moral habits, and the disasters of bad moral habits.

This may seem like a controversial position, but only because philosophy has been largely hijacked by people who wish to use it for personal gain – such as academics and sophists (often the same category). Therefore, modern philosophy delivers abstractions that are clever, confusing, often annoying, and ultimately worse than useless. Academic philosophy is like an overindulged amateur magician – intrusive, irritating, incompetent, but rarely called out.

The four major branches of philosophy – metaphysics (the study of reality); epistemology (the study of knowledge); politics (the study of state power); and ethics (the study of virtue) – are like the plumbing that delivers water to your sink. Aqueducts, sewers, piping – these all only have value insofar as they enable you to turn on a tap in your house and actually get some clean water. Metaphysics, epistemology, politics and ethics – these have value insofar as they enable you to make and enforce better moral decisions in the world.

Think of the immense amount of research, science, engineering and physics that goes into the design and creation of a car – the purpose of which is to get you from A to B. Few people would buy a car without an engine (unless it was to cannibalize parts for another car with an engine) because a car is not a piece of art, a paperweight, or a hat, but a piece of machinery designed to provide mobility. If you give a paralyzed man a wheelchair with only one wheel, your “gift” is cruelty, not charity. The purpose of a wheelchair is to give someone without the use of his legs mobility, and such purpose is not served with only one wheel.

Think of the engineering complexity and technological genius that is required to serve up a web page to your eyeballs. The whole point is to facilitate your viewing. Without that viewing, everything else is worse than useless. If your monitor won’t turn on, the entire infrastructure becomes useless.

The purpose of philosophy – the entire substructure and detailed background arguments – is to give you the information and resolution you need to make better moral decisions in the moment. The purpose of the military – the entire procurement, training, physics, engineering and resource consumption as a whole – is to provide individuals with the skill and resolution to kill others and destroy objects. We cannot imagine an entire military-industrial complex with the sole goal of placing soldiers on the battlefield with complex weaponry, but zero ammunition.

If you take away the final goal, there is no rational way to organize all the prior activities.

If you have a goal to pass a class in university, you have, at least hopefully, objective and well-defined steps by which you can achieve that goal – write an essay, go to class, pass an exam. If you don’t have a final goal, you cannot organize your activities.

This is not to say that all life must be specifically goal-oriented. We do things for fun, as a hobby, to distract ourselves or to pass time – but so what? If we need to quit smoking, not every single moment of our life needs to be dedicated to that task, but we must still have that goal in our mind as a whole. If we need to lose weight, diet and exercise only consume a small portion of our day, but the overall goal remains important.

Hopefully, you will not spend every waking moment of your day making crucial moral decisions, but you will need wisdom and certainty when those moments come.

So, let us now examine and understand the theory of “universally preferable behaviour” (UPB), or the rational proof of secular ethics.

Ethics: An Introduction

All philosophy argues for a preferred state – the very essence of philosophy is to differentiate between various states, to point out the most preferred, and the best way to achieve it.

This may sound confusing, but this is exactly the same process pursued by dietitians, doctors, scientists, engineers and so on – a dietitian differentiates between various food choices, points out the preferred outcome, and the best diet to achieve it.

A doctor differentiates between various states of illness and health, and guides his patients towards the best practices and medicines to regain and maintain health.

A scientist differentiates between various states of ignorance and knowledge, and guides himself and others through the scientific method to discard illusion and achieve accuracy.

If there is no such thing as a preferred state, there is no such thing as philosophy – or free will, or morality, or debate, or truth, or falsehood, or science, or medicine – I can keep piling these on until you accept that there is such a thing as a preferred state.

If there is a preferred state, the question naturally arises – compared to what?

If I prefer to eat toast rather than gravel, my evaluation is based on what my body can digest. Digestible and nutritious food is preferable to indigestible rocks. This is not a subjective preference, but rather is decided by my body’s capacity for turning matter into energy.

Some preferences are objective, some are subjective. Objectively, I cannot gain nutritional energy from gravel. A madman may choose to eat gravel rather than toast, but this is one way we know that he is insane. Subjectively, I may prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate ice cream. The science of nutrition deals with objective requirements, rather than subjective tastes.

The fact that some people reject objectively preferable states does not make those states any less objective or any less preferable. To lose weight, you must eat fewer calories and/or exercise more – this is an objective process necessary to achieve an objective state. The fact that most overweight people either never lose weight, or lose weight and then gain more back, in no way makes the objective process and goal of weight loss any less objective.

If I am driving and my destination is south, and I keep driving north, this doesn’t change the direction of my destination. Persisting in error does not destroy truth, but rather affirms it.

In philosophy, the preferred state is truth – in other words, statements that accurately describe the objective facts, properties and processes of empirical material reality. Empirical material reality is objective, rational and universal – a stone is a stone and possesses the properties of a stone everywhere in the universe.

Philosophy is the rational hypothesis of empirical action. A proposed preferred state must be rational before it can be acted upon, since actions take place in reality, which is rational.

In engineering, a blueprint must conform to the nature and properties of things in reality before it can be even considered as a plan for creating something. If you try to build a bridge in Manhattan while assuming the moon’s gravity, your bridge will collapse because your gravitational factor is off by a factor of six. If a doctor makes important medical decisions based on the belief that blood is inert in the body, he will be far less likely to heal people.

Philosophy requires rational consistency because “truth” is a mental category that is measured relative to objective reality. If I say there are three coconuts when there are only two, my statement is false, compared to the simple facts of objective reality.

Arguing Against Preferred States

Humanity appears to be mentally constituted to attempt to find at least one exception to every proposed rule – and naturally, you are probably trying with all your might to find an exception to the concept of preferred states. However, it is logically impossible to argue against preferred states, because the act of arguing itself requires a preferred state.

The act of arguing with someone rests on the implied premise that you are correct and that your opponent is incorrect. If I point at Africa on a map and refer to it as the Arctic, and you correct me, it might not be much of a debate, but clearly you are correcting me with reference to the true name of that continent, which is Africa. You are not saying you have a made-up name for the continent, personal to you, and that you would like me to indulge you by referring to the continent by that name – you are in essence saying two things:

1. The correct name for the continent is “Africa.”
2. Using the correct name is infinitely preferable to using the incorrect name.

I use the phrase “infinitely preferable” because some preferences are relative, and some preferences are absolute. I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla ice cream, but I prefer ice cream as a whole to Brussels sprouts. These are relative preferences, in that I would prefer Brussels sprouts to starvation. In general, people prefer ice cream to arsenic, but there are situations in which arsenic may be preferred, such as when facing certain torture, or a certain slow lingering death in some remote place, or unending exposure to the comedy stylings of Amy Schumer.

However, would you ever say that referring to the continent of Africa by its correct name is a relative preference? In other words, would there be an occasion where you would be fine with it being called by some other name? If I want chocolate ice cream, but the restaurant only has vanilla, I might shrug, accept my second choice and still be relatively content – would the same be true for misnaming Africa?

Of course not. Correctly naming the continent is a binary option – you either get the name right, or you get the name wrong.

If you are sailing from the Bahamas to New York, the accuracy of your navigation is not a binary option – there is no such thing as perfect navigation. Every wave and gust of wind will put you “off course” a tiny degree. (Please note, this does not mean that there are no degrees of accuracy. There is of course such a thing as more accurate and less accurate – and a certain level of inaccuracy will have you miss your destination completely – but it is a difference of degree, not of kind.)

However, the proposition that the earth is flat is binary – it is either flat or it is not. It cannot be halfway between spherical and flat.

The proposition that the earth is a sphere is infinitely preferable to the proposition that the earth is flat. It is not occasionally flat, it’s not flat every second Wednesday – and thinking it’s flat is not “almost as good.” It’s not an okay second choice. The earth is a sphere, it is not flat, and that is that.

Truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood. If you try to argue against this, you automatically prove that your proposition is false and should be rejected, because in the very act of arguing, you’re preferring truth over falsehood.

Most people struggle mightily against this basic reality, and at some point the irrational, angry will collapses, and peace and reason reign in the mind.

Given that we cannot argue against preferred states, we must continue with our exploration of what preferred states are.

Preferred Goals, Preferred States and Preferred Processes

The preferred goal of medicine is health; the preferred goal of training is expertise; the preferred goal of nutrition is healthy eating, and so on.

Some of these preferred goals are universal, some are local, and some are subjective. Human beings cannot get nutrition from sand; certain diets are good for some people, but bad for others, and the taste of food can be highly subjective.

In science, the goal is accuracy about the universe, because accuracy is a preferred state – and the preferred process is the scientific method.

In philosophy, the goal is truth, because truth is a preferred state – and the preferred process is reason and evidence.

Preferred processes are defined relative to a goal. If you have no goal, you can have no preferred processes. If I have a goal called “arrive in New York,” my preferred process is accurate navigation.

The essential question to ask is: What makes philosophy unique?

Philosophy aims for truth, to be sure, but so do countless other mental disciplines – it’s not like mathematicians strive for irrationality, or scientists aim for falsehood.

There is a philosophy of science and a philosophy of mathematics. Philosophy is the overarching discipline for all human thought – but there is very little “science of philosophy,” or “mathematics of philosophy.”

Philosophy is the largest circle of mental disciplines – science, engineering, medicine and mathematics show up as smaller circles within the larger circle of philosophy.

Prior to the scientific revolution, there was a philosophical revolution that focused on scepticism, materialism, empiricism and rationality, while strenuously rejecting immaterial or superstitious forms of “knowledge.”

Philosophy cannot be the same as science, otherwise there would be no need for the word “philosophy.”

Philosophy cannot be unrelated to science, since science relies upon philosophical concepts such as rationality and empiricism.

Science cannot be larger than philosophy, because philosophy examines ideas outside the realm of the physical sciences.

Since philosophy is larger than science, we must ask ourselves: What is it that philosophy examines that science does not?

The answer, simply, is: ethics.

Science tracks material objects and their properties – it describes what is and what is to be, according to rules that operate independent of consciousness.

Psychology attempts to understand human behaviour and how memory, emotions and reason interact, and how best to achieve optimal functioning, but psychology is not in essence a moral discipline. In psychology, generally, something is dysfunctional if it interferes with productive and happy functioning within a particular social context. The morality of that social context is not often directly examined by psychology, which tends to use the words “dysfunction” and “illness” rather than “evil.”

The study of ethics is unique to philosophy – although some scientists have attempted to use the scientific method to establish the basis of ethics. In my view they have been unsuccessful, since they tend to approach moral questions from a consequentialist standpoint, aiming at a more efficient distribution of resources, or an improvement in human health as a whole, rather than defining good and evil from first principles. “Trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what works best,” is not science, and it certainly is not moral philosophy.

Morality and Preference

If you want to say something true about the natural universe, you need to use the scientific method. If you want to lose weight, you should eat less and exercise more. If you want your bridge to stand, you should follow the principles of engineering.

However, if you are not using the scientific method, this does not mean that you are not a scientist – a scientist does not necessarily use the scientific method while eating or sleeping; this does not mean he is not a scientist, or that he is anti-scientific. Even the person most dedicated to losing weight cannot diet and exercise all day, every day. When he is not dieting or exercising, does that mean that he is no longer dedicated to losing weight? Does that mean he is suddenly dedicated to gaining weight?

Of course not.

However, things are different in the realm of ethics. If I fail to respect someone’s property rights by stealing, I am now a thief. If you murder someone, you are now a murderer. A momentary deviation from dieting does not invalidate the diet, but a momentary deviation from “not raping” creates a rapist.

We do not expect a scientist to practise science every waking moment, but we do expect a moral person to refrain from raping, murdering, assaulting and stealing every waking moment. Sir Isaac Newton was a scientist, although he deeply believed in the superstition of alchemy. His science is judged on its own merits, and his superstitions are discarded accordingly. A man who mixes science and superstition may still be considered a scientist, but a man who mixes pacifism and murder is not still considered a moral person.

Most human disciplines require positive or proactive actions. To become a scientist, a pianist, an engineer or doctor requires training and practice – and success, one would hope.

However, most moral commandments involve refraining from specific action and they do not require years of training and expertise. We would never expect a three-year-old toddler to be a concert pianist, or a scientist, but we do expect a toddler to refrain from punching his playmates. We do not call upon five-year-olds to construct complex bridges, but we do expect them not to snatch toys from their siblings.

“Preferred” Versus “Preferable”

We do not expect everyone to be a scientist, but we expect scientists to use the scientific method. We do not demand that everyone become an engineer, but we do expect engineers to build things that stay up (or down, perhaps, if they are designing a submarine).

The scientific method is universally preferable for scientists, but it is not universally preferable that everyone become a scientist, or that scientists use the scientific method every waking moment. Rational calculations are universally preferable for mathematicians, but we should not force everyone to become a mathematician.

Just because something is preferred does not mean that everyone will in fact choose to do it. Cutting calories is the preferred way of losing weight. This does not mean everyone will cut calories and lose weight.

The difference between what should be done and what actually is done, is the difference between “preferable” and “preferred.”

“Preferred” refers to the past, to what is objectively measurable: “Sally preferred to paint her room red.” “Joe preferred to go left rather than right.”

“Preferred” refers to the past; “Prefers” refers to the present; “preferable” refers to the future.

Thus, “preferable” is the only word wherein ethics can exist.

Philosophy is like exercise – it exists to help you avoid problems in the long run, not survive a health crisis in the moment. If you call up a fitness trainer and say, “I have a family history of heart disease. What should I do?” the trainer can give you advice on healthy exercise habits, with the goal of avoiding a heart attack in the future. If you call up the trainer and say, “Aargh, I am having a heart attack right now, what exercise advice do you have for me?” – well, the trainer will doubtless tell you to hang up and call for an ambulance instead. The trainer can help prevent a heart attack in the future; he cannot save you from a heart attack in progress.

The goal of moral philosophy is primarily prevention, not cure – and where there is no cure, prevention is all the more important. If you ask a moral philosopher what should be done in a society where the government has racked up untold hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt and unfunded liabilities, then the philosopher will probably not have a lot of helpful advice – the “heart attack” is already imminent. If, decades before, you had asked a philosopher whether the government should embark on such a course, then the philosopher would have said that was a grievous violation of property rights and a pillaging of the unborn, and deeply and woefully immoral.

Philosophy has no power in the past. None of us do. It is frozen in time, inaccessible to will or alteration – or even facts, sometimes, since memory can be so malleable.

Philosophy has no real power in the present, because the deep steps and learning required for true moral understanding cannot be compressed into the time slice of the here and now. If you are on vacation and get cornered in a dark alley by some giant man screaming at you in Russian, and you don’t speak Russian, it’s not exactly a great time to start learning the language. If you spent years studying Russian beforehand, you have a chance to negotiate, or at least understand what he wants.

Philosophy only has power in the future – and it only examines the past in order to avoid mistakes in the future. You study your family medical history mostly with the goal of avoiding repeating any mistakes that were made.

Morality and Non-Compliance

Moral principles are not voided by non-compliance. This is an essential point to understand and seems hard to grasp for many people, perhaps because they are constantly looking for ways to avoid and evade moral principles in the present.

Some people don’t take medical advice – this doesn’t mean that medicine is pointless or irrelevant. Some people drop out of school – this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t bother educating anyone. Some people drive drunk – we don’t plow up all the roads and ban cars.

People don’t always follow moral rules – that is the whole point. If moral rules were automatic and involuntary, they would be physical rules, and the purview of physicists, not moralists. We have choices, we have ideals, and our behaviour often falls short of perfection.

A rule does not have to be followed in order to be objective. Mystics do not follow the scientific method; this does not mean that the scientific method is as irrational as mysticism.

This holds particularly true for the discipline of ethics. The reason we need a discipline of ethics is because people often fail to follow moral rules. The idea that immorality erases morality is like saying there is no need for encouragement, because sometimes people get discouraged.

People act badly; that is why we need ethics. It is a simple as that.

Ethics and Individuals

An ethical theory cannot be judged by individual actions, any more than a scientific theory can be judged by the integrity of any individual scientist. If we propose a moral rule such as “don’t steal,” is it invalidated if someone steals? Of course not – in fact, the more people deviate from a moral rule, the more it needs to be explained and reinforced.

The fact that gases expand when heated is not invalidated by any particular scientist who fudges his data to “prove” the opposite. In fact, the reason we know the scientist is cheating is because of the scientific method.

One cannot rationally invalidate the virtues and values of the free market by pointing out a single business failure, or a man who loses his job. Removing resources from unneeded occupations is one of the primary pruning mechanisms of the free market, and a central reason why it facilitates the growth of wealth so efficiently.

Ethics and Theories

The primary dangers to human life and happiness – to virtue itself – are irrational ethical theories, not individual evildoers. A serial killer may kill a dozen or more people, but communism has murdered close to one hundred million. A thief may make off with your car or your jewelry, but governments extract trillions of dollars from their citizens every single year and create hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities for future generations to inherit – almost infinitely more than any mere thief could achieve.

You can arm and protect yourself against an individual thief, but Genghis Khan, with a great army, slaughtered 10 percent of the world’s population in his day.

Governments across the world throughout the twentieth century murdered two hundred fifty million of their own citizens – and such governments were reinforced and justified by particular ethical theories, ranging from fascism to communism to socialism to various other forms of collectivism.

Society in general has little to fear from individual criminals. The law acts against them, good people shun them, and steps can be taken to protect oneself from their predations – installing alarm systems, moving to a better neighbourhood, buying a gun, and so on.

No, it is centralized, collectivist and oligarchical institutions that reason and evidence compel us to fear the most – those institutions that can take our property virtually at will, often imprison us on a whim, conscript us into wars, burden us with debt, enter us into intergenerational liabilities without our approval, and indoctrinate us virtually from birth in the narratives that reinforce their dominance.

This examination of ethics focuses squarely upon ethical theories, not on individual actors. Many of us have been programmed to respond to an examination of universal ethical theories by citing individual immorality – that is one way those who rule us ensure we cannot speak rationally about virtue, or examine the narratives that enslave us. The fact that people do evil does not invalidate a moral theory. Evil actions are the fundamental reason why we need moral theories in the first place!

The fact that we can eat badly is why we need the science of nutrition. If a man gives a speech about healthy dieting, and a woman keeps interrupting him to cry out that she knows someone who eats badly, we can fully understand why the crowd gets restless and annoyed. She is a kind of heckler, an interrupter, who is managing her own anxieties rather than trying to inform the audience.

Arguing Against Universality

Ethics are universally preferable behaviours – actions that people should or should not take – independent of time and location.

If you argue against this proposition, then you are affirming it. You are telling me I should not engage in the act of communicating universally preferable behaviours. In other words, you are saying it is universally preferable behaviour that nobody should advocate for universally preferable behaviour.

Ethical actions cannot be universally positive in nature – i.e., thou shalt – because it is impossible to achieve positive actions universally. If I say that it is ethical to scratch your head, you cannot keep scratching your head forever. If I say that it is ethical to give to the poor, you cannot give to the poor forever, or while you sleep, or after you have run out of money – at which point, you are poor yourself and have nothing left to give.

Negative actions – prohibitions, or “thou shalt nots” – can be achieved universally.

It is possible to go through your entire life without murdering anyone, raping anyone, assaulting anyone, or stealing from anyone. Indeed, it is possible for everyone in the world to achieve such perfect virtue.

Think of it this way – if I say everyone in the world has to go live in a cave underneath the Washington Monument, this cannot be achieved because so many people simply wouldn’t fit, among many other impossibilities. On the other hand, if I say no one in the world is allowed to live in a cave underneath the Washington Monument, well, everyone can achieve that in perpetuity.

Thus, ethics must be bans on positive actions, rather than commandments to achieve those actions.

Ethics and Universality

Why should ethics be universal?

Ethics are generally statements or preferred actions that are binding upon others. If I say I prefer sushi, this creates no binding requirements upon you. You do not have to love or hate sushi, I am just informing you of my personal preference. You and I can simultaneously have different opinions about sushi. Since we are not imposing our opinions on each other through force, the possession of personal opinions can peacefully coexist.

However, if I say it is universally preferable behaviour to respect property rights, the universality of my statement creates a binding requirement upon you to respect property rights.

There are three categories of actions:

1. Morally neutral behaviour, such as running for the bus.
2. Aesthetically preferable behaviour, such as being on time.
3. Universally preferable behaviour, such as respecting property rights and not initiating force.

Aesthetically preferable behaviours, such as being on time, are preferable, but not universal. If you are sitting at home and you do not have an appointment, you have no requirement to be on time.

Also, if you are late for an appointment, you are not enforcing your will on others. You are not initiating the use of force against them, and neither are you violating their property rights. This is the difference between rudeness and immorality.

A friend who is perpetually late can be avoided or planned around – a random mugger or murderer cannot be.

Respecting property rights can be universalized, while violations of that respect – such as theft and fraud – cannot be avoided in the same way that a tardy friend can be avoided.

In other words, you need to take proactive actions to continue to be subject to violations of aesthetically preferable behaviour. You need to stay in a relationship with a rude friend, continue to arrange meetings with a tardy companion, or choose to remain in a voluntary relationship with a lover who betrays you.

The initiation of force, however, is the voluntary imposition of a violent will on an unwilling person. This principle cannot be universalized, since if the moral principle proposed says that “Everyone should impose their violent will on everyone else,” then such violent will cancels itself out. Person A should impose his violent will on person B – but person B should also impose her violent will on person A.

Since it is considered preferable to impose a violent will, then such violent impositions cannot be morally opposed – and in fact must be approved of as moral.

However, if physical aggression must be morally approved, then it is no longer violence. If I want you to impose your violent will upon me, you are no longer using violence. The difference between rape and lovemaking is that rape is unwanted sexual activity. The moment that sexual activity is desired, it is no longer immoral. A surgeon cuts you with your explicit consent – a mugger who stabs you does not.

Since the initiation of force cannot be universalized, it cannot be moral.

The Moral Framework

In science, there is the scientific method, and the practice of science. There is the framework – which is that empirical observation trumps mental hypotheses – and the requirement that experiments need to be reproducible, and so on.

Within this framework – the scientific method – the practice of science takes place. Various scientific hypotheses are proposed, compared with rationality and the empirical evidence of the senses, and sorted with regards to accuracy.

In philosophy, there is reason, and then there are specific arguments. Rationality is the framework or the methodology. The practice of philosophy is the creation of arguments.

In ethics, there is the moral framework and then there are specific ethical theories.

The moral framework requires that ethics be universal and that moral arguments be rational. In addition, moral arguments that predict and explain the practice of various moral theories – such as democracy, fascism, socialism, communism, capitalism, and so on – gain additional weight. The explanatory powers of moral theories will never be as perfect as physical scientific theories, since human beings possess free will, while individual atoms and physical laws do not. However, human beings respond to incentives, which goes a long way to explain the successes and failures of various ethical systems.

Those who propose ethical theories that are neither rational nor universal are not proposing ethical theories at all – any more than a man who proposes an entirely subjective and untestable “scientific theory” is practicing science.

Various mystical theories use pseudoscientific terms to justify subjective wish fulfilment that is supposedly inflicted on the universe. Others use actual scientific terms – quantum flux! – but without any scientific understanding or application.

Ethical theories do not directly block violent actions. For that, the virtue of physical self-defense is required.

Correct ethical theories are used to oppose incorrect ethical theories, such as those that justify the initiation of the use of force or fraud. These incorrect ethical theories, particularly when combined with the overwhelming power of government force, are the greatest dangers facing humanity.

Ethics and Nihilism

You will come across those who say, “All ethics are subjective.”

The first response to this would be to ask such a person if it is objectively true that all ethics are subjective. The key word in the statement is “are” – this is a statement of objective equivalence. The moment that a universal statement is made, universal subjectivism self-detonates.

“There is no such thing as truth” – this is a statement of truth.

The moment someone tries to correct you by using a truth argument, they cannot say that objectivity does not exist. If you say, “Ethics are universal,” and the nihilist says, “Ethics are subjective,” then he is attempting to correct your “wrongthink” by referencing objective truths. In other words, he is saying that it is objectively true – and universally preferable – to say that there are no such things as objective truth and universal preferences.

Ethics and the Coma Test

It is generally understood that a man cannot be evil if he is in a coma or sleeping deeply. While in a coma, he is not violating anyone else’s rights to life, liberty or property, and therefore he is not being immoral. This is known as the “coma test,” and is another way of reinforcing the argument that ethics must be a series of bans on positive actions.

Any moral commandment that cannot be achieved universally, even by a man in a coma, fails the test of universality, and therefore is invalid.

What moral commandments can be achieved universally?

To put it another way, which moral commandments do not contradict themselves?

Since reality is consistent, any self-contradictory universal commandment is automatically invalid. Think of a court case. If a man has an ironclad alibi, he should never be put on trial, for the simple reason that a man cannot be in two places at the same time. If the prosecution’s case requires that he be at the scene of a murder and a thousand miles away at the same time, this is an insurmountable contradiction that cannot possibly be true.

If a scientific hypothesis requires that physical matter both attract and repel other matter simultaneously, then the hypothesis proposes a contradiction, and is therefore automatically invalidated.

Any moral theory that proposes a contradiction is automatically invalidated.

If you argue against the proposition that human beings are responsible for the effects of their actions, and you directly reply to the man making that argument, you accept that he is responsible for the argument he has created. You cannot deny that people are responsible for the effects of their actions while requiring that people be responsible for the effects of their actions in order to respond to your argument – Logic 101 fail.

Morality and Property

The concept of property arises from the reality that human beings are responsible for the effects of their actions. Another way of putting this is that human beings “own” the effects of their actions.

Imagine you are child playing with your brother and he knocks over a precious lamp. Your mother storms into the room and demands to know who knocked over the lamp – why?

The simple reason is that she wants to determine who is responsible for the lamp being broken – who “owns” the breaking of the lamp.

You can certainly claim that people are not responsible for the effects of their actions, but you contradict yourself the moment you open your mouth. First of all, you create an argument that you are responsible for. If I create such an argument, and you start to rebut me, and I then tell you that I have no idea what you are talking about – I never made such an argument and it has nothing to do with me – this would be a sign of mental illness, or psychopathic levels of manipulation.

An argument is just as much a product of your body as a house, a song – or a murder, for that matter.

If you say to someone you are debating with, “You are wrong!” you are saying they have created an argument that is false – that they own the argument, and they own the “wrongness” as well.

If you say to someone, “You are a fool,” then you are saying they have done something that earns them the label of foolishness.

Arguing against property rights requires accepting property rights; it is a fool’s position.

If you clear an acre of land in an unowned wilderness, you own the cleared land, since you are responsible for it coming into being. If you cut down trees and use the wood to build a house, you own the house because you are responsible for it coming into being. Property is fundamentally about creation, not expropriation.

After high school, I spent a year or so working in the wilds of northern Ontario, gold panning, prospecting and staking claims. To establish temporary ownership over the mineral rights of a piece of land, I had to march in a square kilometer and nail metal plates to trees on all four corners. It was not an enormous amount of fun to march through bug-infested or icy landscapes in order to establish these rights – and these rights had no value in and of themselves. However, if gold was discovered and a mine was built, this process was required to establish exclusive ownership.

Without this process, no gold would be extracted from the ground. Without the capacity to establish mineral rights, no mines would be dug. It is only through the process of establishing property rights that gold is moved from an inaccessible location deep underground to the surface, to a smelter, and then eventually to a jewelry shop.

The goal is jewelry – the method is property rights.

Think of fishing – a fish deep in the ocean is not available for use. The fisherman does not create the fish, but he does transform it into a usable product. By pulling it out from the bottom of the ocean, he converts it from non-property to property. To understand this more viscerally, imagine setting up a stall in a fish market and selling not fish, but rather the right to eat a fish somewhere out there on the bottom of the ocean. How many takers would you have? The fisherman is really creating a meal, which requires that the fish be pulled from the bottom of the ocean.

Morality and Theft

Let’s say you have three people in a circle – Bob, Doug and Sally. Bob argues that the world is flat. Doug is outraged, turns to Sally and says that she is completely wrong – what would Sally do?

Surely, she would splutter and reply that she didn’t say anything about the world being flat! If Doug persists in replying to Bob’s argument by debating Sally, this would pretty much be the actions of a crazy person.

This is an irrational transfer of ownership – Doug is pretending Sally was responsible for the argument that Bob created.

Imagine you come across a murder victim in an alley. Just then, a policeman walks up and arrests you for the murder. “But I’m innocent!” you cry. You are protesting the unjust transfer of ownership of the crime. The policeman incorrectly assumes that you are responsible for – that you have caused, and therefore own – the murder.

If you cheat on a test, this is an irrational transfer of ownership. You are saying that you own your answers, which have been generated from your own studying – when in fact the answers have been generated from someone else – from cheating.

Property is control. If you take someone else’s property without his permission, you are asserting control over that property – asserting property rights – as if you were responsible for the creation of that property.

If someone else creates something, and I assert control over it without his permission, I am enjoying all the benefits of creation without any of the accompanying hardships and risks. In a very real way, I am lying about who created the object. I am pretending that I created the object – and thus should have the right of exclusive use – when in fact someone else created the object, and should themselves have the right of exclusive use.

If I buy an iPad, I am to some degree responsible for the creation of that iPad, because if no one buys iPads, none get made. Trade is secondhand creation, but creation nonetheless. (Also, I must justly own the money I used to buy the iPad – money I probably received by selling something I created or owned, such as an object or my service.)

The fact that we own ourselves and are responsible for the effects of our actions is a basic biological and moral fact – it cannot be denied without being affirmed, and thus must universally stand.

Theft and Universally Preferable Behaviour

Is it possible for stealing to be universally preferable behaviour?

No.

If stealing is universally preferable behaviour, then everyone must want to steal – and be stolen from – simultaneously.

This is logically impossible. If I want you to steal from me – if I want you to take my property – then you cannot steal from me, because the definition of stealing is that it involves taking my property against my will.

Think of it this way: you and I are throwing a ball to each other – can I throw the ball to you and receive it at the same time?

Of course not – that would require the ball be going in two opposing directions at the same time.

If I want you to take my property, you cannot steal it. If I put five dollars into the hand of a beggar, I cannot claim that he stole from me, because I am voluntarily giving him my property – I want him to take the five dollars.

Stealing occurs when the desire for property is oppositional – when the thief wants the object, and the owner wants to retain it. Their opposing desires cannot both be satisfied simultaneously.

This is how we know stealing cannot be universalized – and remember, that which cannot be universalized cannot be moral.

This is how we know that stealing cannot be universally preferable behaviour. In other words, this is how we know that respecting property rights is universally preferable behaviour.

Furthermore, stealing is a positive action – meaning you have to do something to make it happen – while respecting property rights is a negative or passive action. A man is respecting property rights while he sleeps, in that he is not stealing. Stealing requires means, motive and opportunity, and the positive action of theft.

Rape and Universally Preferable Behaviour

The same holds true for rape – defined as sexual behaviour against the will of the victim. We can never say that rape is universally preferable behaviour, for the same reasons that we can never say the same of theft. If rape is universally preferable behaviour, then everyone must want to rape and be raped. But if everyone wants to be raped, then “rape” vanishes as a moral category, in the same way that if everyone wants to be stolen from, then “stealing” vanishes as a moral category.

Assault and Universally Preferable Behaviour

There are situations where you can be beaten up, but you cannot press charges. If you entered a boxing ring with your gloves on, it doesn’t make much sense to claim that you were assaulted. Playing rough sports – hockey, in particular – always carries the risk of injury, and rarely results in criminal charges. Think of the movie Fight Club – would it make any sense for the voluntary participants in the fights to press charges against their opponents?

If I voluntarily consent to being hit – such as in boxing – no immoral action has been committed. Assault only occurs when I am being hit against my will, or under circumstances where I have not reasonably assumed that risk.

To take another example, if you enter a sadomasochistic dungeon and sign a consent form agreeing to mild forms of sexual torture, you cannot then reasonably charge your dominatrix with assault.

This is how we know assault cannot be universally preferable behaviour. Not only is it a positive action, and therefore cannot be universalized, but it comes with the same logical contradictions as proposing that rape and theft can be universally preferable behaviour.

If everyone wants to assault and be assaulted, then “assault” vanishes as a moral category.

“Not assaulting,” however, can be universalized, since it is a negative action – or a ban on a positive action, if you like – and therefore can be achieved by all people, at all times. Refraining from assault also passes the coma test.

Murder and Universally Preferable Behaviour

Murder follows the same pattern as rape, theft and assault. Murder is the killing of a person against his or her will. If “murder” is proposed as universally preferable behaviour, then everyone must want to murder – and prefer to be murdered – at the same time.

This positive obligation violates the coma test and also cannot be universalized, since murder is the act of killing someone against his will – but if murder is universally preferable behaviour, then everyone must want to be killed, which would put the killing in the category of “euthanasia” rather than “murder.”

If we assume that murder is not morally identical to euthanasia, then we can accept that the irrational proposition that “murder is universally preferable behaviour” trips over the same logical contradictions as the prior three examples. If everyone wants to murder and be murdered, then “murder” as a moral category ceases to exist.

Even if we assume that murder is morally identical to euthanasia, the act of murdering is still a positive action and thus cannot be universalized. In other words, it fails the coma test, and therefore is invalid as a moral proposition.

In hospitals, sometimes patients sign “do not resuscitate” forms. This means that, in the event of a medical emergency, nurses and doctors are not allowed to attempt to save the patient’s life.

In the absence of this form, medical professionals are required to use every available means to resuscitate the patient and save his or her life. Failure to do so would constitute grievous medical malpractice.

However, if the patient has signed the “do not resuscitate” form, working to resuscitate becomes the wrong thing to do.

A medical professional is responsible for a death if he or she refrains from applying every reasonable measure to maintain life – unless the patient has requested otherwise, in which case the medical professional has no liability for the death – and in fact may face sanctions for keeping the patient alive against his or her wishes.

Here we can see that the consent to die completely reverses the morality of the situation.

(By the way, I do support the right of people to end their own life, if they choose to. The foundation of a rational moral philosophy is the non-aggression principle, which states that human beings are not allowed to initiate force against others. We know this principle is valid because it is not a positive obligation and thus does not violate the coma test, and also because it is universal – it is entirely possible for all human beings to refrain from initiating violence against others everywhere, for all time. Given this, euthanasia does not violate the non-aggression principle, because no initiation of force is involved in the agreement. We can consent to being “stabbed” in the form of surgery, in order to cure us of a disease – no one considers the surgeon to be guilty of the crime of assault. If life itself has become a disease, and a doctor cures you with your permission, the same principle applies.)

The Ramifications of Secular Ethics

The ramifications of a rational proof of secular ethics run deep and wide, and I have discussed some of the challenging re-evaluations of existing norms in my other books and articles. Suffice it to say that placing the non-aggression principle at the centre of our moral thought completely rewrites what we think of as society from the ground up.

This may be hard for some people to work through, emotionally and intellectually, but it is essential for the moral progress of humanity.

Over the last hundred years or so, in the Western world, we have seen the unmitigated awfulness of the First World War, the Second World War, hyperinflation, a fourteen-year Great Depression, communism, fascism, innumerable genocides, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, staggering levels of national debts and unfunded liabilities, a collapsing infrastructure, ruinous and decaying public schools, ever-escalating propaganda in higher education, a migrant crisis, increased racial and ethnic tensions – just to name a few of the virtually endless disasters of the modern world.

When societies continually lurch from disaster to disaster, essential principles need to be re-examined – or created for the first time, if need be. We should not fear this examination, but rather welcome and embrace it as a difficult but necessary salvation for civilization.

We have a modern world – with its benefits as well as its disasters – because people in the past challenged essential assumptions about personal and political ethics.

Christians in the West fought and paid and bled and died to end slavery worldwide, with significant success. Slavery was a tradition as old as mankind – for well over one hundred thousand years, and probably closer to one hundred and fifty thousand – and it was ended in a matter of decades, at least in the West.

For countless thousands of years, the state and the church were unified in most Western societies. The separation of church and state – the restoration of the original Christian concept of uncoerced conscience – was eventually largely achieved, albeit after hundreds of years of religious warfare.

Free trade, unimaginable throughout most of the Dark and Middle Ages, was largely achieved from the eighteenth century onward in some European countries.

Equality before the law was largely achieved, albeit with a highly wobbly and uncertain record since.

Moral progress is a difficult and dangerous game for society. The only thing more dangerous than moral progress is moral stagnation and decay.

The Value of Philosophy

We have tried organizing society in countless different ways – none of which fundamentally involve philosophy.

Philosophers have tried entering politics – Plato took this approach in Syracuse and almost ended up being sold into slavery – but that generally meant playing by the foggy rules of sophistry, manipulation and coercion. It is dangerous to tell the truth to a society programmed to love lies.

We have tried organizing society by religion, by class, by theocracy, by tribalism, by democracy, by republics, according to the general will, via fascism, communism, socialism, through the power of the aristocracy and the influence of money over the state – we have tried just about everything except reason, evidence and universal morality.

We have tried revolutions, which impose irrational ideologies – usually by force – upon the unwilling masses. We have tried wiping traditional social values out of existence and replacing them with propaganda, which results in endless and brutal disasters. We have tried appealing to sentimentality, emotion, patriotism, racism and all the volatile and often-destructive passions of the mob. We have deployed sophistry, falsehoods, indoctrination, manipulation, superstition, ostracism for nonconformity, verbal attacks, slander, libel, endless state-sponsored violence – with the end result that we face imminent disaster as a civilization.

The appeal to reason goes back thousands of years – at least to the time of Socrates. It has always remained incomplete and fragmentary, largely because the twin tyrannies of theology and statism threatened or killed those who questioned their imaginary principles.

As free speech gained more certain footing, ostracism and exclusion were deployed to keep freethinkers out of the discussion. Academics, media personalities and owners, publishers, movie and television studio heads – you name it – the gatekeepers were always out in full force, making sure that discussion remained somewhat lively, but only within very narrow parameters.

The growth of the internet – of unfiltered conversations – has created the great gift of the possibility of reason to mankind for the first time in human history. The possibility of universal and direct speech among the curious and the thoughtful has never before existed – and is quite threatened in the here and now.

The possibility exists (in a very narrow window, I believe) that we may finally be able to submit essential questions – of good and evil, force and peace, violence versus voluntarism – to philosophy, to the twin judges of reason and evidence.

Forces opposed to philosophy – most of the existing power structures in the world, from the state to academics to the mainstream media, to public and private powermongers of every kind – gather even as you read this, even as we speak, to shut down the growing voices demanding and respecting philosophy.

Mankind has the power to think and reason, to oppose evil and support virtue. We are born with this power, but it is scoured and stripped from us through omnipresent propaganda and violence.

Our birthright is free thought; our upbringing is ever-escalating censorship and abuse.

Society remains trapped within a dismal cycle wherein economic freedoms bring wealth, wealth brings political corruption, and corruption brings social collapse. As the old saying goes, hard men bring good times, good times bring weak men, and weak men bring bad times.

The only way out of this cycle is through philosophy, through an acceptance and submission to objective reality and rationality, through the development and promulgation of universal and rational ethical propositions, and through the rejection of anti-rational ideologies.

All of this sounds wonderful – who could be against the rational? – which begs the question: Why has it yet to be achieved?

It has yet to be achieved because philosophy has yet to take down its greatest foe.

The universalization of equality under the law eliminated slavery and the various injustices against minorities. And it is working slowly but surely against the prejudices of childism – the acceptance of male and female genital mutilation; and the physical violence against, the mental drugging of, and the overall neglect of children.

Equality under the law is not a universalization, since there are those who remain above the law – not just in theory, but in practice.

The existence of centralized lawmakers – of the state – is a violation of universality and rationality, and thus remains an anti-rational moral hypothesis.

Taxation is the initiation of force to take property.

Science does not advance through voting – a scientific theory is not considered valid if fifty-one out of one hundred scientists vote for it.

Moral propositions do not become valid because the majority votes for them.

Two men in a forest do not morally get to rape a woman they find, even if all three put it to a vote.

Two crazy people do not logically get to override a mathematician who tells them that two and two make four.

Truth, reason, objectivity and virtue lie outside the collective mindlessness of the mob.

The mob voted to put Socrates to death; their vote did not make their murder moral.

Sophists love to make the mob the standard of virtue, because sophists are so good at manipulating the passions of the mob.

The Essence of Sophistry

The main purpose of sophistry – its main value to those in charge – is its capacity to create pseudo-universals.

If you can create a rule called “thou shall not steal” – and then create an exception to that rule for yourself, your group, your tribe – or your government – then you are about the most effective thief you can be.

Governments were instituted, so the belief goes, to protect property and people.

This is entirely false, as history clearly shows.

Governments “protect” people in the way that farmers protect their livestock – in order to ensure maximum continued exploitation. If governments were so interested in protecting people, then why did governments murder over two hundred and fifty million of their own citizens – outside of war – in the twentieth century alone?

Governments “protect” property because property rights promote wealth generation. Governments apply property rights to their tax livestock in the way that farmers apply antibiotics to their meat livestock.

If governments were so interested in protecting property, then why do governments take the majority of their citizens’ property at gunpoint?

Many priesthoods around the world claim that everyone is subject to the law of God, but then claim priests alone have special access to the will of their God. Ignorance of God’s law is no excuse, but only they truly understand God’s law.

Here again we see a category and an exception.

The exception is the purpose of the categorization – morality was originally invented to convince gullible people to be “good,” so they could be more easily and efficiently exploited by evildoers.

Think of the “social contract.”

In this construct, people voluntarily give up certain freedoms in order to gain the protections of the state. However, this describes nothing at all in reality. We are born subjected to the near-infinite power of the state, which can strip us of our property and freedom virtually at will, and we never sign a damn thing.

Also, note that the “social contract” is unilateral – it can only be imposed by governments upon citizens, not by citizens upon each other, and certainly not by citizens upon their government. If the government is part of society, but it is exempted from being subject to the initiation of force justified by the social contract, then we have a special sophistic exception, a pseudo-universal.

If the government is not part of society – but is composed of human beings – then we have more pseudo-universals. The concepts of “humanity” and “society” contain opposite moral prescriptions – a commandment to respect persons and property, which applies to human beings called “citizens,” and an opposite commandment to violate persons and property, which applies to human beings called “the government.”

Once you begin to see these pseudo-universals, they will be revealed everywhere, and you will understand that they form the basis for the development of almost all systems of morality.

The destruction of sophistry is the destruction of pseudo-universals and the revealing of the naked coercive power that hides behind the hidden weaponry of ornate language.

The organization of human society along the lines and arguments of rational philosophy – according to the true universals reflected in reason and empirical evidence – will finally create a sustainable society of universal freedoms. The grim cycle of history – from freedom to abundance to corruption to collapse – will be broken at last.

It is my fervent hope that you will join me in promoting philosophy – to help turn this “hope” from a destructive mirage into a true oasis that can liberate and sustain us.

Massive swaths of humanity have adapted to surviving on the shreds of power, like pilot fish living on the scraps of sharks’ meals. The transition from coercion to voluntarism will not be easy, but as long as we have free speech, as long as we have a strong will, and as long as truth and reason are on our side, it is my belief that we will prevail, and the world will become free.

If society continues as it is, the existing fascistic finance system will collapse, the food supply will falter, and untold millions of people will fight and die. This is not a vision, but a mathematical and historical certainty.

It is probably too late for everyone to be saved by words, but enough can be saved to make words worthwhile.

Perhaps more importantly, philosophy can lay the foundation for the kind of society that will arise from the ashes of coercion and anti-rationality.

The great danger is that the coming crisis will be blamed on freedom, on trade, on property rights, on free speech and voluntarism. With this kind of diagnosis, our remaining freedoms will become like life-giving trees, hacked down and used to fuel the raging fires of eternal fascism.

What we have gained, the freedoms we possess, are too precious to sacrifice, even at sword point.

Entire future generations hang in the balance of what we do now, today – the words we can wield, and the strength of our will, and the consistency of our positions.

You have freedoms because past generations did not fail you.

Do not fail the future, or there will be no future.

Sample Arguments

“Reality Is Subjective”

• I wish to take issue with the quaint notion that we can comprehend such a thing as “objective reality.” We do not, as humans, have the capacity to determine objectivity, or directly perceive what is commonly called “the real world.” Every statement we make contains the implicit premise: “as I see it!” “This is true, as I see it.” Every culture, every religion, every individual sees reality and defines truth in a different manner. And it is the mark of an uneducated person to imagine that his own personal perspective somehow translates into “true” statements about “objective reality.”
• Thank you for your statements. Are you saying it is objectively true that we cannot perceive objective truth?
• That is a foolish first-year undergraduate question, a silly trap from which there is a simple escape. The very concept of “objectivity” is what I wish to dismiss. Saying that it is objectively true that there is no such thing as objective truth would of course be a contradictory statement, but my whole point is that we should start rising above such petty tricks, and look at the true limitations of our “knowledge.”
• I do not see how that answers my question. You admit that both claiming and denying objective truth is a contradictory position, but then you deny the validity of the question, without making any further argument. It seems to me that you are denying the capacity for disproof in order to be able to make bland assertions without the requirement for reason and evidence.
• See, here is the problem again – you are talking about proof and disproof, and reason and evidence, and that is my point exactly! Such terms arise from archaic perceptions of philosophy prior to the rise of our understanding of quantum physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and other deep explorations of reality that utterly destroy even the concept of objectivity. We can call this the subjectivity hypothesis. I know it is difficult to accept emotionally, because we are so wedded to the superstition of objectivity – just as our ancestors were wedded to the superstition that ghosts lived in trees – but we must accept science and outgrow our prior limited perspectives.
• Are you saying that objectivity has been scientifically disproved by science?
• I am trying not to get impatient, but you do keep talking about proof and disproof, despite my repeated reminders that these are terms of mere historical interest, like “Zeus” and “alchemy.” Science supports the subjectivity hypothesis. Anthropology supports the subjectivity hypothesis. Cultural studies, gender studies, historical analyses – all these disciplines support the subjectivity hypothesis. Now, if you wish to master each of these disciplines and overturn the obvious subjectivity of their greatest practitioners and deepest analyses, be my guest – such a fantastic hubris is beyond my humble self.
• Do you consider science to be a subjective or objective pursuit?
• Again with these words – subjective, objective – I am saying that they are meaningless!
• No, you started this conversation by claiming that objectivity was incorrect and that we can only make statements about subjective perception. You made absolute statements – one of which was: “Whatever we say must be appended with ‘as I see it.’ ” However, you are not using your own thesis of universal subjectivity to reject my requirements for proof. Your argument that my words are archaic and should be discarded is presented as an absolute fact, not ‘as you see it.’ You make absolute statements about universal truth, and then retreat into rank subjectivism when I ask for objective proof of objective truths.
• Well of course everything I say is subjective – my point is that everything you say is subjective as well.
• Subjective – compared to what?
• There is no such thing as “compared to what.” That is my entire point! I have my subjective perceptions, you have your subjective perceptions – and that is the sum total of the human experience: subjective perceptions!
• So, when you say you know the “sum total of the human experience,” is that a subjective perspective, or an objective claim?
• It is a denial of objectivity!
• Is it a subjective denial of objectivity?
• Of course – everything is subjective!
• When you say everything is subjective, you are making a universal claim! Do you not understand that?
• If everything is subjective, there can be no such thing as a universal claim.
• I am a little confused – do you actually know what the word “everything” means? It means all things – in this case, every human perspective.
• Sure, every human perspective is subjective.
• Is it your subjective perception that other human beings exist?
• What do you mean?
• Pretending to not understand the question is usually a way of buying time, but all right, I will explain what I mean. If you say that every human perspective is subjective, you are claiming that other human beings exist outside your mind, which is an objective statement.
• I cannot prove for certain that other human beings exist outside my mind.
• Hm – now you seem to be friendlier with the word “prove,” but let us put that aside for now. If you cannot prove other human beings exist outside your mind, how can you make claims about the contents of their minds?
• I do not follow.
• All right – if I do not know how many art galleries there are in Budapest – or even if there are any art galleries in Budapest – how can I make certain claims about the pictures hanging in an art gallery in Budapest?
• I am not sure what this has to do with our argument.
• Well, if I do not know whether there any art galleries in Budapest, can I definitively say that there is no modern art hanging in any art gallery in Budapest?
• Again, you are using words like “definitively,” which I specifically reject.
• This is the problem we are having – any time I try to apply any kind of proof to the universal arguments you are making, you claim that there is no such thing as universals. You claim that all human perceptions are subjective. This requires that you have a deep knowledge of the contents of the minds of every human being, past, present and future. This is a universal statement.
• Nonsense! Do you believe that all mass has gravity?
• I do.
• Does that mean you require deep knowledge of all mass in the universe – past, present and future?
• Of course not.
• I do not require a deep knowledge of the contents of every human being’s mind to know that human beings are subjective, any more than you require deep knowledge of all mass to know that mass has gravity.
• I quite agree. When I make a universal statement about mass having gravity, I do not need to know details about every object in the universe – that is the entire point of universals.
• Then we are in agreement.
• We are, but not in the way that you want, or will like very much. We agree that you have made a universal statement about human subjectivity.
• I most certainly did not!
• You most certainly did – and you used the universal statement “mass has gravity” to supposedly argue against what I was saying. When you have a universal principle, according to your argument, you do not need specific details. You can only affirm that all human beings are subjective by using a universal principle, rather than a deep knowledge of all human consciousness. This you cannot wriggle out of – if all human beings are subjective, that is either a universal principle, or an empirical observation of universal characteristics. Either way, it is a claim of universal truth outside merely subjective human consciousness.
• Once more, you veer towards words like “proof” and “truth” and so on, when I specifically deny the validity of such language.
• Is such language universally invalid?
• You are stuck in a loop.
• No, my friend, it is you who are stuck in the loop. You make universal truth claims and absolute objective statements. When I then press you for proof or point out the contradictory nature of your statements, you merely deny the validity of truth, absolutism and objectivity. I reject such sophistry as foolish and self-serving. And so I ask you once more: Is it universally true that there is no such thing as universal truth?
• And I reply once more: There is no such thing as universal truth.
• Is that a universal truth?
• It is whatever you want it to be, my friend, because everything is subjective.
• I wish to be honest with you – I view your manipulations as destructive and cowardly. If you do not believe there is any such thing as universal truth, then why do you make philosophical arguments? Should there not be rational consequences to the rejection of particular concepts? For instance, if I claim I do not believe in ghosts, would it be honest for me to make money by leading people on ghost-hunting expeditions? If I claim to be a fishing guide while I do not believe there are any fish in one particular lake, does it make any sense for me to make money by encouraging people to fish in that lake? If I do not believe in God, am I an honourable man if I become a priest?
• Your comparisons do not make any sense to me.
• If I reject the possibility of alchemy – a magical process by which lead can be transformed into gold – then does it make much sense for me to spend my life trying to turn lead into gold?
• You can do whatever you want!
• No one is arguing against that. My question is: If I truly believe that everything is subjective, does it make any sense for me to use arguments to “correct” other people’s perspectives?
• Of course it does, if someone incorrectly believes that his consciousness can be objective!
• Here we are, right at the heart of things, and I thank you for putting your argument so concisely. You believe my perspective is incorrect, is that right?
• Of course. That should be obvious by now!
• If everything is subjective, how can I be incorrect?
• You are incorrect if you believe that something can be objective.
• That is not true. If everything is subjective, then all human perspectives are a matter of taste. If I say I like French fries, can you rationally contradict me? Can you tell me that I am wrong?
• Perhaps not, but if you say French fries are universally the best, then I can tell you that you are wrong.
• How can you tell me I am wrong? With reference to what? The reason I am asking is because when I attempt to disprove your arguments, you reject any standard of proof for objectivity or universality or comparison with material reality. Why could I not do the same to you if you attempt to disprove my belief that French fries are the best?
• I do not follow.
• If my subjective belief is that human beings can be objective, how can you disprove my perspective?
• Well, if everything is subjective, believing that objectivity is possible is incorrect.
• Why?
• Because it is a contradiction. It is a belief in something that is not true to say that human beings are capable of objectivity, since all human consciousness is subjective.
• So now you are willing to entertain the reality that a self-contradictory statement is incorrect. Earlier, when I pointed out that your statement that “it is universally true that there is no such thing as universal truth” was contradictory, you rejected self-contradiction as a valid reason to dismiss your argument. Now, you are embracing self-contradiction as a valid reason to dismiss my argument. The only thing that has changed is that in this scenario it is I who make the self-contradictory argument, whereas previously, it was you who made the self-contradictory argument. This is not a fair application of the principle, to apply it only to me, while excusing any self-contradictory arguments that you make. This is really a “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario.
• Now I am confused.
• No, you are not confused, you are just wrong.

“There Is No Such Thing as Free Will”

• Free will is an illusion. The human brain is composed of matter and energy, which are physical objects and properties. Such entities are subject to physical laws, which do not allow for free will. Saying that human beings choose their destiny is like saying that the moon chooses its orbit. Free will is the belief that human beings have the power to make choices outside the material realm of physical reality – in other words, that we are inhabited by a wilful ghost that is able to magically surmount the laws of physics and generate material states of mind from immaterial causes. Studies have repeatedly shown that human beings merely think they are making choices, when brain scans can clearly see that the origins of their “decisions” occurred deep in the mind, and then are only rationalized after the fact by people holding on to their precious superstition of free will. We are programmed by our minds to act – and we are also programmed by our minds to believe in free will, which mostly arises out of a superstitious lack of knowledge regarding the scientific reality of determinism. Prior to having physical explanations for natural phenomenon – storms, volcanoes, tsunamis – we projected an imaginary consciousness onto the material world. It is understandable, although regrettable, that largely through a lack of scientific understanding, we still project an imaginary consciousness called “free will” onto the material brain. It seems hard for people to let go of the soul, or the imaginary friend called “free will,” because it takes away their sense of specialness, as well as their ability to morally castigate others for their “failings.”
• There is a lot to digest in what you said. I will try to take things one step at a time. When you say that free will is an illusion, do you mean that an accurate understanding of the world – you refer to science very positively – is preferable to false beliefs about the world?
• Of course, we should always prefer truth to illusion, no matter how hard it is for our fragile egos – or for our illusion that we even have an ego.
• It does seem odd to me, I will confess, that you criticize those who believe in free will for morally castigating others, but you seem to refer to such people in derogatory terms. However, we will return to that later. First I wish to understand your position, that there is such a thing as a preferred state – for example, truth over falsehood – when the deterministic position would imply that there is no such thing as a preferred state.
• Determinism does not deny the existence of preferred states.
• Well, if it rains on your wedding day, you would be unhappy, but you would not take it personally – in other words, you would not ascribe negative moral qualities to the weather for ruining your special day.
• Of course not. That is my entire point!
• Would you say that it is possible for the weather to have a preferred state?
• I do not follow.
• Is it possible for a storm cloud, say, to prefer raining on a lake rather than a meadow?
• If I follow you correctly, no, I do not think it is possible.
• Can you think of any condition under which a storm cloud would – or could – have a preferred state?
• No.
• Now I am confused – is not your entire argument that the human mind is functionally indistinguishable from a storm cloud?
• Both are composed of matter and energy, yes.
• Right – and would you say that matter and energy can themselves have any kind of preferred state? In other words, could it be possible that the moon would prefer to be closer or further away from the earth in its orbit?
• No, the moon could not prefer that.
• Is there any form of matter or energy that could have a preferred state?
• Not that I can think of – and certainly not according to my arguments.
• And that is what is most remarkable about the deterministic position. You say the human mind is exactly the same as every other aggregation of matter and energy in the universe – and that it is utterly ridiculous to ascribe singular qualities to the human mind – while at the same time you ascribe singular qualities to the human mind, setting it aside as utterly different from every other aggregation of matter and energy in the universe.
• I do not see how I am doing that!
• Let me show you this hand puppet, which I will call “Ned.” Now, you are having a debate with me – with my mind – which seems like a rational course of action to you. You say that I have no more free will than this hand puppet, but I assume you would consider it insane to continue this debate with my hand puppet instead of with me.
• Now you are just being silly.
• That is not an argument. Do I possess more free will than my hand puppet?
• No, neither of you possess free will.
• All right, then why is it sane to debate me, but insane to debate Ned?
• I am not sure what you are getting at.
• I think that you are sure, but you are just stalling and pretending ignorance in the hopes of making my argument look foolish.
• That is also not an argument.
• How right you are! Let me try another approach. Let us say I am getting married in a hall with a retractable roof. During the ceremony, it starts raining. What should I do?
• Well, close the roof of course.
• I am in my wedding best and I do not know how to close the roof – what should I do?
• Get someone familiar with the building to close the roof.
• Exactly! Alternatively, I could scream up at the clouds to stop raining, or I could attempt to ask the roof itself to close.
• You mean, talk to the roof?
• Yes, exactly. Wait – does that seem a little crazy to you?
• Well it does not seem exactly sane, and if I were getting married to you, I do not think I would complete the ceremony.
• I think that would be wise! So, it would be sane to talk to a person about closing the roof, but it would be insane to talk to the clouds, or the roof itself. My question is: Why?
• I am not sure why you would ask that.
• The reason I would ask that is because you are telling me that there is no difference between the cloud, the rain, the roof – and the human being I would ask to close the roof. All are mechanical, predetermined objects, with no free will of their own. Why would I only talk to the person, if the person is exactly the same as everything else? If I see three apples in front of me, I say each of the apples is exactly the same, and yet I will only eat the first apple and would consider it insane to take a bite out of either the second or the third apple, can my perspective that the apples are exactly the same be rationally sustained?
• No, if you will only choose one of the apples and strongly reject the others, they cannot all be the same.
• Thank you – that is my perspective as well. Therefore, you need to explain to me why the apple you call a person is so different from the apples you call the cloud or the roof.
• If I understand your question correctly, the answer is simple. The person has an input system called the senses, which the cloud and the roof do not. If you beckon to a person, or call him over, he is capable of perceiving your request, and changing his behaviour accordingly. If you ask him to close the roof, he has ears, and will hear you – while the roof has no ears, and cannot hear you.
• An excellent answer! If I am a singer, and record a song, my recording device has inputs, does it not?
• It would not be much of a recording device if it did not.
• Now, if my song wins an award, would it seem sane or crazy to you if, at the awards ceremony, my recording device received the award?
• What?
• Being in possession of an input device – whether it is a microphone jack or a set of ears – makes no material difference in the deterministic universe. An input device does not magically provide an entity with free will. For instance, it is easy to instal microphones on the side of a computerized robot and then program it to respond to various inputs. Here we have a machine that responds to external stimuli. Would you say that I have granted such a robot free will?
• No, of course not – that is why I am arguing that neither human beings nor robots have free will!
• Have you ever argued with a robot?
• Not unless you are a very well-made robot!
• While funny, jokes will not save your argument. How many arguments or debates have you had with human beings?
• Hundreds, perhaps thousands.
• Well that seems entirely bigoted of you, my friend! All those debates with human beings, but none whatsoever with robots? Again, we are back to square one: you say that human beings are exactly the same as robots, but would consider it crazy to argue with a robot, while it’s perfectly sane – valuable even – to argue with human beings. It cannot be due to the presence of inputs, since robots can easily have inputs as well – in fact, almost all do.
• So you are saying that I should argue with a robot? The difference is that I know what the robot is going to respond with. I do not know what you will respond with.
• That is not necessarily true – the robot could spit out randomized numbers or randomized phrases, which would be unpredictable. Also, you do not know what form a cloud is going to take in the next minute, but that does not mean you will stand in a field like King Lear and scream at the clouds, right?
• Human beings are far more complex than anything you are talking about here – far more complex than rain or clouds or roofs or robots or anything like that!
• Ahah! Now we are getting to the heart of things, and I appreciate that comment – though by your face you may have some idea where this will now go. You are saying that complexity can breed an emergent property – a property or characteristic that is greater than the sum of its parts.
• I am not sure I am saying that.
• Well, let me explain to you what you are saying! No individual atom has the power to reverse or arrest the direction of light, correct?
• Each atom affects the direction of light.
• Of course, but no atom can itself reverse the direction of light.
• That is correct.
• However, if you gather enough atoms together into the form of a black hole, light has no power to escape its gravity well. In other words, the property of “arresting the direction of light” – which is possessed by no individual atom – is possessed by an aggregation of atoms called a black hole.
• Are you saying that atoms possess free will?
• Please try not to jump ahead of what I am saying. All it does is indicate that you are not listening. Life is composed of atoms, is that correct?
• It is.
• In particular, the carbon atom. Would you say that any individual carbon atom possesses the quality called “life”?
• No.
• Certainly not, since there are countless carbon atoms that are not alive or part of any living organism, and therefore carbon atoms cannot innately possess the characteristic called “life.”
• Correct.
• Now, although no individual carbon atom is alive, is it fair to say that particular congregations of atoms – and energy of course – can be part of a living organism?
• Certainly.
• This is an example, I am sure you will agree, of an emergent property – the emergent property called “life,” which is possessed by none of the individual components of a living organism.
• This does not prove free will at all!
• I agree, but it does get us in the right direction at least. Would you say that an individual atom has the property of locomotion, or eating, or reproducing itself?
• No.
• An individual carbon atom cannot run across the African plain, but aggregated into the form of a lion, so to speak, it can. Individual atoms cannot produce other carbon atoms, but through insemination, pregnancy and birth, animals can.
• This seems all rather elementary.
• I agree. Let me ask you this: Does any individual atom in your brain have the capacity to engage in a debate?
• No – three of them act together, though, and I win!
• Again, funny is not right. You are engaging in an action – debating – that relies on a vast and stacked pyramid of emergent properties. No individual atom can clean your blood, but your kidney can. No individual atom can breathe, yet your lungs work. No individual atom can form words, yet I hear you speak – no atom can debate, yet here we sit.
• I cannot dispute what you are saying.
• At least, not without affirming it! So, your position is that there are countless emergent properties, but that free will cannot possibly be one of them?
• Are you saying that is an inconsistent position?
• It is inconsistent with your first position, which is that atoms have no free will; therefore, human beings have no free will.
• That is still my position!
• No, it is not a position; it is an anti-rational specific.
• I am not technically aware of that term.
• If my entire existence as a human being relies on emergent properties, but my argument denies the possibility of emergent properties, I am in fact a walking self-contradiction.
• I do not deny the existence of emergent properties. I just affirmed them!
• You did, right after I reminded you of their existence – at the beginning of the debate, you denied emergent properties.
• Nonsense, I only denied that free will was an emergent property.
• No, you said that human beings have no free will because atoms have no free will – which is a subset of the proposition that human beings can have no properties not possessed by individual atoms themselves.
• I never said that about all emergent properties!
• No, your argument did not accept that life and locomotion and debating are all emergent properties, but then specifically reject emergent properties in the realm of free will – which would have been honest. Instead, you relied on a base reductionist materialism, saying that all free will was a superstition, a ghost in the machine, without referencing any other emergent properties that might oppose your argument against free will.
• Now you are just pretending to read my mind.
• No, I am simply referring to what you said. However, you are correct in that I cannot prove your state of mind when you make these highly specific points. Now that you admit emergent properties exist, you must now prove there is no possibility that free will is an emergent property.
• I refer you to the numerous scientific studies that show human behaviour can be predicted fairly accurately with deep brain scans of the subconscious motivations for supposedly conscious decisions. People think they are choosing whether to click on a red or blue icon on a screen, while their subconscious mind has already made that decision for them.
• Even if we accept all these studies as true – although their accuracy rate is never 100 percent or even very close – the entire purpose of science is to achieve the preferred state of truth or accuracy, which implies that there is such a thing as a preferred state, which requires the concept of free will. The moment you say it is true that there is no such thing as free will, you are accepting that there is a preferred state called truth, which human beings should voluntarily choose.
• Do you not think that the truth is preferable?
• Here we have it – in order to correct me during this debate, you must constantly slip into using the language of free will. “Truth,” and “preferable,” and “choice,” and so on.
• I cannot reject all of the existing habits of language. If I say that there is no such thing as God, am I religious for having used the word “God”?
• I am not sure what that means, but it does not address my argument. If you say that I should choose to accept determinism and reject free will, can you not see that that is a contradiction?
• I want you to embrace the truth, yes.
• Do you think that is preferable for me to choose the truth?
• Of course!
• Then you have already accepted that there is a preferred state, and that I have the capacity to compare the contents of my mind to that preferred state, and choose better. If that is called being a determinist, then I guess I am a determinist as well, since only the labels differ, not the contents of our arguments.

“The Senses Are Invalid”

• I wish to take issue with the naïve notion that we have some kind of direct conduit to reality through the mechanism of the senses. Everything that comes to our mind through the senses is narrow, incomplete and fragmentary – and people who imagine they can assemble some universal and coherent view of the universe through the tiny windows of the senses are delusional.
• I have noticed that those who oppose universals always start off with insults – pairing negative emotional terms with the arguments of their opponents. For instance, you have referred to arguments for the validity of the senses as “naïve notions” and to those who hold such beliefs as “delusional.” I am generally suspicious of people who begin a debate with subtle – and not-so-subtle – insults, because if you have really good arguments, I do not see the need to start by insulting your opponents. When I teach my child that two and two make four, I do not need to be insulting; that is the mark of bad faith – or suspect reasoning, to be more precise.
• I am sorry if you were offended by my argument.
• And now you heap further offense upon me by implying that I could be offended by a mere argument, removing any causality for offense from you, by stating that any offense is my subjective perception only. But we shall never get anywhere this way. I merely wish to express a certain frustration that I have with people who start by being offensive, who then pretend the offense is only the subjective perception of their victim. Let me start by asking you on what grounds you find the senses deficient. Are our eyes deficient because they do not see X-rays or infrared, and so on – and are our ears faulty because they hear less than a dog’s ears?
• The senses are deficient, my friend, because they promote limited, fragmentary information, which often does more to misinform than to enlighten the mind.
• All right, let us start here. Are the senses deficient in what they process, or what they do not process? In other words, I certainly accept that our eyes do not see everything that could be perceived in the universe – that is a limitation, of course. My question is: Are the eyes also deficient in what they do see?
• I do not follow.
• When I look at a tree, I see the outside of the tree on the side I am facing. I do not see the heat signal of the tree, I do not see the history of the tree, I do not see inside the tree, and so on. My eyes and perspective are certainly limited. My question is: Are the senses faulty because they are incomplete, or because they are inaccurate even in what they can process? In other words, I cannot see inside the tree, but do I accurately perceive the bark on the outside of the tree that I am facing?
• I believe that the senses are incomplete, and also that they are inaccurate in what they do perceive.
• All right, thank you. Since we both agree that the senses are incomplete, we will put that aside for now. Can you tell me in what way the senses are inaccurate in what they do perceive?
• Well, when you look at a tree, you only see what the light reveals, at your particular angle, and in the level of detail your eyes allow.
• Yes, I certainly accept that the eyes are limited. They do not see at the atomic level, and they do not operate in the absence of light – but is what they do perceive accurate?
• I am not sure what you mean by the word “accurate.”
• Excellent, let us define our terms. In this context, “accurate” means the eyes provide a true portrayal of things in the world, given the limitations of detail and spectrum and so on.
• So, your big value-add to the definition is to provide a synonym?
• Now it is I who do not follow.
• Well, you say that the word “accurate” is defined by the word “true,” which does not seem to add much to the conversation.
• A good point. Here, let me grab a cup and draw a circle by tracing the top turned over on the table. Now, when you look at what I have drawn, do you see it as a circle?
• That is actually quite a complicated question.
• I agree.
• It is certainly not a perfect circle, would you agree?
• I would agree. A perfect circle cannot be delineated in the world, using material objects, since there will always be ragged edges and imperfect rotations, and so on. A perfect circle can only be described mathematically, not manifested materially. In that, I quite agree with you that the senses are imperfect relative to concepts – however, just because something is imperfect does not mean that it is the same as everything else.
• Continue?
• Well, is there such a thing as perfectly clean water?
• No.
• Of course – perfectly clean water is expressed in science as two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Water does exist in the world in this form, of course – it is the essence of water, so to speak – but it is always mixed with other materials to one degree or another. However, the fact that there is no such thing as perfectly clean water does not mean that all imperfections are the same. If I hand you two glasses of water – one from the tap, the other from a muddy puddle – which would you drink?
• I would drink the tap water.
• Good. Accuracy, in other words, is not a binary proposition – the senses are not either valid or invalid, but inhabit a kind of continuum, wherein they can approach accuracy, or move further away. An archer can never hit the exact centre of a bull’s-eye with his arrow, but that does not mean there is no difference between an archer who hits the red and an archer who misses the target completely.
• That makes sense to me. However, the senses can easily fool us, in the case of optical illusions, mirages and so on.
• Let me ask you something. Have you ever tried to take a picture, but then realized you left the lens cap on the camera?
• Of course, although these days it is more of a thumb on the cell phone camera instead.
• Would you say that the camera is not working if you leave the lens cap on?
• No, I would not say that.
• I would not either, for the same reason that I do not complain of blindness every time I close my eyes. My eyes are functioning; they are just covered by my eyelids. In the same way, when we stand on a set of train tracks, the rails look like they are joining together in the distance, when we know they are actually running parallel, because they would be unusable if they merged together.
• Exactly, the senses are faulty.
• Are they? Do the eyes inform me directly that the train tracks merge together?
• I am not sure what you mean.
• Let us suppose I am hiking in some distant woods, and I think I hear the growl of a bear. My heart starts pounding and my palms become sweaty – but then it turns out I am just hungry and it is my stomach that is growling.
• That is quite an appetite!
• Is it the fault of my ears that I thought a bear was approaching?
• Certainly.
• But my ears are just organs of receptivity – they do not know anything about bears or the woods or anything like that – because these are all concepts, which only really exist in my mind.
• Well, without entering into the truly thorny woods of concept formation, I agree.
• So, it is not in my ears that the idea of “bear” arises, but rather in my mind. In the same way, if I am sitting in a hotel room and think it has started to thunder outside, but it turns out it is just guests in the upstairs room moving furniture around, the concept of “thunder” and “furniture” do not exist in my ears, but rather in my mind.
• Are you saying that the senses can never make mistakes?
• My, my – you really are a big fan of binary absolutes, aren’t you? The question here is: Which organ is making the mistake? In the above examples, it is not the senses, but the brain that is making the mistake – thinking that the stomach’s growl is a bear’s growl, and that the moving furniture is thunder in the sky. This is not the fault of the ears, which are accurately transmitting vibrations in the air – this is the fault of the mind, which is drawing erroneous conclusions from the raw data provided by the senses.
• Yes, but listen – a man who is colour-blind sees only shades of grey, when there are in fact vibrant colours – this is not the fault of his brain, but rather of his eyes.
• Certainly, I agree – and the reason that we have the word “colour-blind” is because it is a deficiency in the eyes relative to the capacity of eyes in general. We do not really have the concept of “X-ray blind,” because human beings do not have the capacity to see X-rays directly. The fact that certain senses are faulty does not invalidate the senses as a whole – we know they are faulty because they do not possess the capacities of senses in general. A man in a wheelchair does not invalidate the fact that men in general walk.
• Yes, I can see that.
• Now, I am not saying that the senses are always perfectly accurate or that they can see everything – but I am saying there is reliability in what the senses can perceive. Your argument would be much stronger if we had only one sense to work with. However, we can walk down the abandoned train tracks and see that the rails never do in fact touch together. In this way, we understand a rational limitation of our senses – our eyes, in this case – and that our idea that the rails come closer together is false.
• Wait a moment – what do you mean by saying “rational limitation”? Are you saying that the eyes are designed for some rational purpose, by some rational being?
• Not at all. In our evolution, it was highly advantageous for our eyes to focus on that which was closer, rather than further away. Picking apples was more important to us than seeing a distant tree, and so the fact that the apple appears bigger to us makes perfect sense.
• And that is my point – you have put it precisely! Our sense organs are designed to serve our survival, rather than the truth.
• This seems to posit the idea that our survival has nothing to do with an accurate perception of things in the world, such as food and shelter and predators – is that what you mean to say?
• Well, almost all organisms have some capacity to perceive the world. That does not mean they are in possession of the truth.
• Very true. The relationship between concepts and the senses – conceptualization being a unique human capacity, as far as we know – is rich and complicated, but is not directly necessary for the resolution of this discussion. The question before us is: Are the senses valid? If the standard of validity is a perfect perception of every aspect of matter and energy in the universe, then we have an impossible standard to achieve. It is like asking if a man is intelligent relative to omniscience. Referring back to the circle I drew earlier, it is certainly not a perfect circle – in that we completely agree – but would you ever look at it and say that it is a square, or a spiral, or a dodecahedron?
• No, assuming the conventions of language.
• Is it closer to a perfect circle than a square or a spiral?
• Yes, I suppose so.
• You are hedging, which defies what you just said, which is that you would never look at my circle and say that it was a square or a spiral. But let that pass. Now, if you and I are standing in a field, and I point at a boulder and call it a “tree,” am I correct?
• What if it is a boulder that has been carved into the shape of a tree?
• That is clever, but that would still not be a tree, which is why you had to refer to it as “a boulder that has been carved into the shape of a tree.” Again, assuming the conventions of language, would I be correct to call a boulder a tree?
• No, you would not be correct.
• There are things I can say about a tree that are on a continuum. If I say a particular tree is “tall,” that is a somewhat relative statement. It could be a tall bonsai, or a short redwood. However, there is no continuum between a boulder and a tree – that, I grant you, is binary. Something is either a boulder, or a tree, or something else – it is never half-and-half.
• I am going to say nothing about petrified wood.
• I appreciate that. When I talk about a tree or a boulder, I am talking about the atomic structure of such objects. Even though I cannot see the atoms directly, they form the basis of the aggregation of matter that impacts on my eyeballs through light waves. Different atoms result in different objects. Just as there is no continuum between a carbon atom and a hydrogen atom, there is no continuum between a boulder and a tree, correct?
• There could be, if you measure weight or mass or height – these are characteristics that they would both possess.
• That is true, but incomplete.
• How so?
• Well, height or weight or mass are measures common to all aggregations of matter. They would not be on a continuum between a boulder and a tree, but would rather be characteristics of all mass.
• Fair enough.
• So, in their capacity to accurately provide the information necessary for my brain to distinguish between a boulder and a tree, is it fair to say that my eyes are accurate?
• They are accurate, I think you are correct, but they are still incomplete.
• Incomplete – relative to what?
• Relative to all the available information in the world.
• I do not see how it is rational to use a yardstick entirely out of range of the capacities of what you are measuring. Do I call a man illiterate because he has not read every printed word in human history? Do I call a man deaf because he cannot hear a dog whistle or Roger Taylor’s falsetto? More importantly, do I call a man blind because he cannot see infrared? This seems like a silly and irresponsible standard, to hold everything finite as inconsequential according to a yardstick of infinity. A man who lives for only one-fifth of a natural human lifespan dies young. Saying everyone dies young because they should all live to be a thousand does not really add much to human knowledge or wisdom, would you say?
• The senses are still limited, though.
• Well, something is limited around here. All right, let me ask you this, so we can devolve from abstractions to the immediate. You say that the senses are faulty, correct?
• Correct.
• Now, in the sentence “The senses are faulty,” which word falls short of perfection?
• I do not understand.
• In order to communicate your argument that the senses are faulty, you must use my hearing to process your words. What is the perfect form of the sentence “The senses are faulty,” and in what way does that sentence, when communicated through the senses, fall short of that perfection?
• Still not following, sorry.
• If you write down on a piece of paper the sentence “The senses are faulty,” then each word would not be perfect, each letter would not be perfect, but in what way are the concepts that are communicated imperfect or faulty? In other words, when I drew the circle, the circle was imperfect – in what way is the concept that the circle represents faulty?
• I do not see that it is.
• Exactly. If I put two ping-pong balls in front of you and use them to illustrate that one and one make two, the ping-pong balls are not perfect – they are slightly different sizes and shapes and weights and colours and so on – but they transfer the concept that one and one make two perfectly, would you not say so?
• I think so, but I am still trying to follow.
• I understand. You rely on the senses to transfer concepts and arguments to me – in this case, my hearing – in other examples, my sight. All the senses are incomplete, you say, or imperfect – but that is not the real issue. The real issue is whether perfect concepts can be transmitted through an imperfect medium. If we are talking over a bad phone connection and I tell you it is raining where I am, this does not tell you how hard it is raining, or which way the wind is blowing, but you do perfectly comprehend the concept of rain, despite the poor communication and limited information. And the reason I am talking about all of this is because if we cannot communicate concepts using our imperfect and incomplete senses, then we cannot engage in debates at all. In other words, by engaging in a debate with me, you are assuming that incomplete senses can accurately transmit concepts. You are telling me that my senses are faulty – this requires that my senses be accurate enough for you to transmit your argument to me. Now, if my senses are actually faulty, you should not use them to transmit your argument, any more than I should drive confidently across a bridge I know has half-collapsed. If you do rely on the accuracy of my senses to communicate an argument about the senses, then denying their validity is self-contradictory.
• I think I see your point.
• If there is no better medium for communicating arguments than the senses, then the senses are good enough. If there is a better medium, I await your psychic conversation.

“Ethics Are Subjective”

• The idea that ethics are scientific or objective is a laughable notion, only sustainable through a back-alley ignorance of the proliferation of ethical theories throughout the world, not to mention throughout history. Every tribe has its own gods, its own moral absolutes and its own superstitions.
• I see – and is it your perspective that every ethical statement is subjective?
• Of course, that is what I just said.
• Then are the statements you are making about ethics also subjective?
• Excuse me?
• Arguing that ethics are subjective is making an objective statement about ethics.
• Not true at all – if I say artistic taste is subjective, I am not making an objective statement about artistic taste – I am confining it to the category called “subjective.”
• You are making an objective statement about artistic taste – you are saying all artistic taste is subjective. In other words, you are not saying that only some artistic taste is subjective. Let me ask it another way – is it your subjective opinion that ethics are always subjective, or is it an objective fact?
• It is an objective fact.
• Excellent – now is it better or worse to have opinions that are true, as opposed to opinions that are false?
• Well, if they are true, they are not really opinions, are they?
• Well said. Is it better to believe things that are true?
• Yes, of course.
• In other words, it is universally preferable to believe true things, rather than false things.
• I am churning my brain trying to think of exceptions to that rule, since I have a deep aversion to universality, because it is so easily broken with a single exception. Yes, I can think of one – if a man is dying from a car crash and his wife and child have been killed, is it better to tell him the truth before he dies, or to pretend that they have been saved?
• I do not think it matters what happens in the last moments of life.
• That is not an argument.
• Tell me, do you think it is important to eat in a healthy manner?
• Yes.
• Do you think it is important for a prisoner condemned to execution to have a healthy last meal?
• I see your point.
• I assume you would not also suggest he spend his last few minutes on this earth exercising, although I am sure that you would agree that exercise is important in life. We can all think of exceptions – or at least what seem like exceptions – to general rules, but this does not necessarily invalidate the rules completely. It is a bad idea to drive significantly over the speed limit, unless you are being chased by criminals or fleeing a tsunami, or are bleeding out from a bad cut. I think we can safely say it is generally better to believe true things, rather than false things, would you agree?
• Let us say that I grant you conditional agreement.
• I will take that for now. If it is better to believe true things, then those who tell you true things – who are honest – are acting in a better manner, are they not?
• Let me think about that for a moment.
• There is not much need, I think. If believing true things is better, then liars lead people away from believing true things, which is worse behaviour. If truth is universally preferable to falsehood, then those who serve truth are universally preferable to those who serve lies. We cannot propose a universally preferable state – truth – and then be indifferent to those who facilitate that state, or who interfere with it. I cannot argue that health is better than sickness, and then be indifferent to a poisoner. If health is better than sickness, then those who serve health are better than those who serve sickness.
• That would seem to follow.
• Thank you – now, what is your definition of ethics?
• What people believe they should do.
• I am not sure that is complete enough – or perhaps it is too broad. If you talk to people, they believe they should floss and brush their teeth, wouldn’t you say?
• Yes, they do.
• Would you say that flossing and brushing your teeth falls under the category of ethics?
• I would not say that, although I could not say exactly why.
• It does seem different than knocking someone else’s teeth out, right?
• Yes, it does.
• I am not inflicting injury on someone else if I fail to brush my teeth, but I am if I knock their teeth out.
• Yes, but this is my problem with most ethical discussions. This difference may feel right, and it may be hard to imagine society operating without this distinction, but none of these are actual arguments – they are appeals to feelings and sentimentality and history and culture and momentum.
• I agree – the fact that brushing versus hitting feels different is not an argument, but we should not be indifferent to our instincts about this difference. Our instincts can have important ramifications for rational arguments – they are not proof, but they can spur our ambition to understand deep and complex questions.
• All right, I appreciate that admission – it is rare, when speaking of these issues.
• I am not going to pretend at all that these questions are easy to answer – and also, I am not going to pretend that there is necessarily an answer.
• Good.
• Now, do ethics in general speak about what people do, or what they think?
• Ethics generally deal with actions, not thoughts.
• I agree. Now, the actions that ethics deal with, are they words, or deeds?
• Ethics generally deal with deeds, not words. There are exceptions, such as shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.
• That is true, but if you shout “fire” in an empty theatre, no one has any problem with that – it is not the word “fire” that is the issue, but rather the resulting panic and flight and destruction, if there is in fact no fire.
• Agreed.
• I think it is fair to say that the word “good” refers to deeds, whereas the word “right” refers to thoughts or words or arguments. We think of good and evil deeds, and right and wrong thoughts or arguments.
• That is the common conception. I agree with that as well.
• I will use the word “behaviour” when talking about ethics since the word “deed” has more than one meaning.
• Fine.
• Now, if we define ethics as “universally preferable behaviour,” then we have a starting point for our examination.
• I do not mind the convention at all, as long as you recognize that definitions are not proof.
• Totally true and understood. Now, we must first ask the question: Is universally preferable behaviour a valid concept or proposition? In other words, is there any such thing as “universally preferable behaviour”? It certainly does not exist in the world in the way that a tree or a cloud does, so UPB must exist within the mind only.
• I agree with that as well.
• Now, the fact that it exists only in the mind does not necessarily make it subjective or invalid. A mathematical equation exists only in the mind – the scientific method itself exists only in the mind, not in empirical reality – but this does not mean that mathematics and science are subjective or invalid. A blueprint is not a bridge, but this does not mean that a blueprint is a purely subjective or invalid or irrelevant document. Would you agree?
• Again, conditionally yes.
• So, first we must ask: Are there any behaviours that could possibly be universally preferable? Please note this does not mean universally preferred – preferable means “able to be chosen,” not “always chosen.”
• I cannot think of any behaviours that could be universally preferable.
• Does this mean you wish to argue against the validity of universally preferable behaviours?
• You know, I really think I do. Wait a minute – I am just thinking… I am trying to find a way to argue against UPB without requiring UPB.
• That is quite a challenge, I admit.
• If I tell you there is no such thing as UPB…
• Exactly. You require UPB in order to deny UPB.
• Can you break that out for me a little bit please?
• Of course. If you tell me there is no such thing as UPB, you are making a universal statement that no one should enact the behaviour of advocating for UPB. In other words, you are saying that it is universally preferable behaviour to reject the validity of universally preferable behaviour.
• That is remarkable! I – I am having trouble formulating an argument against what you are saying.
• Now, you are beginning to see the power of UPB. It is impossible to argue against it without saying that truth is universally preferable to error, and that it is universally preferable to speak the truth, rather than speak falsehood. This dovetails nicely into what we were talking about earlier. Actually, this is very good news. Now that we have established that UPB is a valid concept – or at least, we have established that it is impossible to argue against it without invoking it – we have crossed a major hurdle, and now all we need to do is figure out which behaviours can be universally preferred.
• That is quite a Rubicon – I feel that I am in uncharted territory, very radical uncharted territory.
• It is a terrible thing, when you think about it, how radical mere consistency actually is in the world. Nothing is more revolutionary than consistency. Shall we continue?
• I am quite excited – I had meant to oppose you tooth and nail, but I find myself swept up in this idea.
• Thus we must remember to be cautious, since enthusiasm is quite often more a friend to ideology than to truth. Shall we begin?
• Yes please.
• To take the concept of UPB one word at a time, the first word is “universally” – which is not an accident. If no behaviours are in fact universally preferable, then we have no right to ever correct another human being, or to use accurate words to describe objects or concepts, or to reply directly to the person who has made an argument, or to do anything that makes any kind of sense. The power of universality is the power to correct. Without universality, a “debate” is the mere imposition of manipulative will. Anyone who tells you that you are wrong and attempts to correct your viewpoint, accepts UPB entirely.
• I certainly follow that.
• The second word is “preferable,” which in itself does not primarily refer to behaviours that should be chosen, but rather those that can be chosen. If a behaviour cannot be universally preferable to human beings, then it cannot fall under the umbrella of UPB. “Universally preferable” must refer to something that can be chosen by everyone, at all times, and under all circumstances. Do you agree?
• I do agree. If I say that something is universally preferable, that is either my opinion, or it is an objective argument. If it is my opinion, then it cannot be universal. If it is an objective argument, then I cannot reject either objectivity or universality. If I say that I like dogs, this is a statement of personal preference, not an objective argument about the nature of dogs. If I personally prefer dogs, it is not incumbent or binding upon you to prefer dogs as well. However, if I say that dogs are warm-blooded, that is a statement of objective fact.
• Right. And if we say that it is universally preferable to reject objective facts, we are saying that it is an objective fact that it is universally preferable to reject objective facts, which is a self-contradictory statement. Shall I go on?
• Please do.
• The third word is “behaviour.” This refers to measurable actions that occur within empirical and objective reality – a definition that is entirely to be expected, since UPB refers to objective universals. Thoughts cannot be objectively measured or ascertained in the absence of the objective behaviour that transmits those thoughts in empirical reality. We cannot read minds, but we can read a book. When I speak or write – or hand gesture – I am converting my thoughts into an objective medium. Please note that this does not mean that all my thoughts are objective – I could say, for instance, that I like ice cream, which is not an objective claim. However, the words I use to express my preference for ice cream do exist in the objective world.
• I see.
• Also, there is another important reason to talk about behaviours rather than thoughts, which is that we have almost infinitely more control over our behaviours than our thoughts.
• I am reminded of the old story about the man who is commanded to sit on a mountaintop all night and to not think of an elephant.
• Exactly. Ethics require at least a minimal level of self-control. If a man accidentally strikes another man while in the throes of an unforeseen epileptic fit, we do not blame the first man morally or charge him with assault. We treat it as an unfortunate accident, since he does not have control over his limbs in that moment.
• I agree.
• So, when we talk about UPB, we are really talking about behaviours that are possible for all human beings to choose simultaneously. This is why, in UPB, positive action cannot be a requirement for ethical behaviour, since it is impossible for all human beings to perform a positive action all the time, everywhere. If we say that it is universally moral to give to the poor, this cannot pass the test of UPB, since it requires both gift givers and gift takers, which are not the same category at all. Also, it is impossible to give to the poor while one is sleeping or in a coma – and if we give everything to the poor, we then become poor, and we are then in need of the opposite action, which is not to give, but to receive.
• Are you saying that it is immoral to give to the poor?
• Certainly not – there are positive behaviours that are preferable, just not universally preferable. It is preferable to be on time, but it is not universally preferable to be on time, since we are not all perpetually arriving at an appointment. We can certainly make the case that it is preferable to give to the poor, but it cannot be universally preferable to give to the poor, for the reasons described above.
• I see. Do all behaviours fall into the category of preferable or universally preferable?
• No. While it is true that every action taken by a human being is an action he or she prefers, it is not the case that individual preferences can be extrapolated to generally preferable, or universally preferable. I prefer to listen to a particular piece of music while I write – this does not mean that listening to music, or a particular piece of music, is generally preferable while writing – or even that writing is generally preferable. When you are reading, you are not writing – and there would be little point writing if there were no readers.
• Is there a consistent way to delineate between personally preferable, generally preferable, and universally preferable?
• Once we understand that ethics are a relationship, rather than a commandment, these differences become much easier to understand.
• What do you mean?
• Can a man be evil if he is alone on a desert island?
• I don’t know. Foolish perhaps. Lazy. But not evil. No.
• I agree. Evil is done unto others, not to nature, and not to oneself alone.
• Suicide?
• That is not evil. Tragic, destructive to the happiness of others, but not evil. If a man destroys a stranger’s car, that is the destruction of property and it is immoral. If he destroys his own car, we do not call him evil and he is not prosecuted. The same is true of a human life.
• So – is there a consistent way to delineate between personally preferable, generally preferable, and universally preferable?
• Since ethics only manifest in relationships, we need to look at the question of reciprocity. Reciprocity is the extension of personally preferable actions to mutually preferable actions. It is more of an obligation than a commandment.
• I do not follow.
• Tell me – are you obligated to lend money to a stranger?
• No.
• Are you obligated to lend money to a friend who has himself lent you money in the past?
• Certainly more so than a stranger.
• Right – if you have a rule called “friends lend each other money” – and you have taken advantage of this rule in the past by borrowing from your friend, then refusing to lend your friend money is breaking the rule. It is not a contract, so not enforceable, but it is a mutually preferable action, in that it is not a universal rule, but a privilege earned between friends.
• I see.
• Personally preferable actions do not involve reciprocity. Mutually preferable actions imply local reciprocity, and universally preferable behaviours are commandments that enforce universal reciprocity, such as: I respect your property and person, while you respect mine. For example, flossing my teeth does not involve reciprocity, while punching someone else’s teeth out rejects reciprocity. I want to punch someone; my victim does not want to be punched. I can see by your face that this is not a proof, and I quite agree with you.
• I am glad I did not have to say it.
• If I wake up and choose to listen to a piece of music, this is my personally preferable action. If you and I agree to meet for lunch at noon, we have created a mutual expectation of reciprocity, which is that we will both meet at noon or close to it. If I help you move to a new house, it is with a reasonable expectation that you might perform a similar favour for me one day. We choose to interact with each other, and neither of us is imposing our behaviours on the other.
• But if I am late for our lunchtime meeting, I am forcing you to wait.
• I do not agree – you aren’t forcing me to do anything, because I can stay or leave as I see fit. Also, I have voluntarily entered into the arrangement to meet you at noon.
• So, no direct coercion is involved.
• Exactly. If you are repeatedly late for our appointments, I can stop being your friend, or at least stop arranging to meet you at a certain time. If I keep doing you favours, but you keep rejecting my request for favours, I can just stop doing you favours – no one has coerced me into anything.
• However, if someone robs you…
• Then we are in an entirely different situation. There is neither an implicit nor explicit contract, and I am not free to do as I choose. By pointing a gun at me and demanding my wallet, the thief is imposing his violent will upon me.
• Theoretically, though, could not stealing be universally preferable behaviour?
• No, because stealing is taking someone’s property against his will. If stealing is universally preferable behaviour, then I want the thief to take my wallet. However, if I want the thief to take my wallet, he is not stealing from me. If I put a table on my front lawn, by the road, with a sign that says “Take Me,” then I cannot reasonably call someone a thief for taking the table. In other words, it is not theft if I want my property to be removed. If you rip my jacket from my shoulders and run away, I could call you a thief. However, if my jacket is on fire and I beg you to rip it off me, the same standard can scarcely be applied. When you think about it, the same holds true for rape, assault and murder. None of these can be universally preferable behaviours, because they only occur when one person wishes an activity to happen, while the other person strenuously does not wish for that activity to happen, as in the case of rape. “Consensual rape” is an oxymoron, because rape only occurs when sexual activity is not wanted by the victim. When you think about ethics, they always exist at the coercive intersection of opposing desires.
• Again, theoretically, we could say that imposing desires could be UPB.
• We cannot, though. If all human beings have the right to impose their desires on other human beings, then each imposition cancels out the other impositions. If I have a desire to take $10,000 from you, while you have the desire to keep your $10,000 – but it is universally preferable behaviour to impose desires on others – then my desire to take your money collides with your desire to keep your money, and the principle cannot be universally achieved.
• I am astounded – could it really be that simple?
• Outside of propaganda, you would really be surprised how simple virtue really is.
• Thank you.
  

Afterward: Inevitable Criticisms

In professional wrestling, mullet-haired monster men often snarl at each other before matches, engaging in the time-honoured tradition of trash talking. The purpose of this is to build anticipation for the match.

It would be a very odd thing if, after weeks of trash talking, only one of the wrestlers showed up for the fight.

It would be considered an act of supreme cowardice to trash-talk an opposing athlete while refusing to show up for the actual event.

The same process often occurs in philosophy, wherein an opponent slanders you, insults you, surrounds you with a fiery moat of negative adjectives, while never actually addressing the content of your arguments.

The actual fight is about the reason and evidence presented – everything else is just a distraction. Albert Einstein, remarking on a group of scientists who had signed a document stating he was wrong, said that one scientist proving him wrong would suffice.

If you have the capacity to actually prove someone wrong, you do not need to be hostile or insulting. You do not need to imagine malevolent motives on the part of your opponent, you do not need to insult their intelligence, education, writing skills or appearance – you just need to clearly show where he or she is wrong.

We all know this, but many people seem to constantly forget it at the same time.

I have been reasoning, reading, debating, writing and arguing in the realm of philosophy for over 35 years. I have an Ivy League education at the master’s level, and my dissertation was a deep thesis on the history of Western philosophy, for which I received top marks. For many years, I have had the privilege of hosting the world’s largest and most popular philosophy show, with over half a billion views and downloads. I have interviewed hundreds of subject-matter experts in a wide variety of fields, debated both professionals and laypeople on many complex topics, written half a dozen books, and been interviewed myself by friends and foes alike.

None of this means my arguments are correct, of course – I could have achieved all of this and still be spectacularly wrong. There are many thinkers with greater credentials than I have, whom I consider to be spectacularly wrong. Neither credentials nor experience fundamentally matter in terms of the argument. I bring all of this up because no doubt I will be attacked and scorned with regards to experience or credentials or what have you. I am wrong, some will say, because I do not hold a PhD in philosophy from Harvard or Yale.

This is a fascinating position – I really cannot call it an argument – because the entire history of philosophy is the history of rejecting authority in favour of reason and evidence. Academic philosophers with doctorates worship Socrates; Socrates had no doctorate and scorned arguments from authority. As the saying goes, all science is founded on scepticism of authority. With philosophy, it goes even further. All philosophy is founded on hostility toward authority.

Philosophy is the ultimate democratic discipline. Rational philosophy holds that individuals are entirely capable of processing reality, of reasoning effectively, and of coming to the right conclusions. Philosophy empowers individuals with the capacity to push back against irrational or anti-rational authority using their own individual capacity for thought.

Generally, a refusal to rebut the content of an argument is a confession of cowardice, incompetence or malevolence. Insulting your opponent – at least, absent clear rebuttals to arguments – is a betrayal of philosophy, not its fulfilment.

This is not to say that philosophers must engage with every person who makes a mistake. We do not want to become like the hapless husband in a famous cartoon, who says to his wife that he cannot possibly come to bed yet, because someone is wrong on the internet. However, when someone of prominence and influence is publicly making bad arguments, philosophers are honour-bound to push back against these errors. We do not have to argue with a crazy man on the street corner who is waving a Wingdings pamphlet at rain clouds, but egregious errors from a prominent person tend to stand unless and until we correct them.

If you refuse to engage in such a necessary debate, clearly that is because you fear losing, or you fear anyone coming into contact with your opponent’s ideas. However, if you can effectively rebut bad arguments, why on earth would you fear their increased exposure?

You might fear the exposure of bad arguments because you imagine that the majority of people cannot think and will end up buried under the verbal dexterity and sophistry of a well-credentialed street preacher.

I accept that as a possible position – but then your job should be to instruct the masses on how to think, or at least how to think better, instead of engaging with a sophist who cannot be distinguished from the philosopher by the untutored multitude. Maybe you cannot stop all the sugary commercials aimed at your children, but you can at least educate your children about the dangers of sugar.

If you call your wrestling opponent a coward, but then refuse to show up to the fight, your criticism is utterly exposed as projection – it is you who are the coward.

If you call your intellectual opponent wrong, but then refuse to show up to the debate, your attack is utterly exposed as projection – it is you who are wrong.

The more extravagant your trash talking of your opponent, the more your cowardice is revealed when you refuse to fight him.

The more hysterical your abuse of your intellectual opponent, the more your cowardice is revealed when you avoid debating him.

A number of words and phrases show up as distinct “tells” for intellectual cowardice. I am sure I will receive some of them, so it is worth going over them briefly. As I said above, for philosophy, prevention is by far the better part of cure.

Generic Pejoratives

Calling someone’s argument “reductionist,” or “simplistic,” or “amateurish,” or “unconvincing” is a boring way of saying that you are too cowardly or stupid to engage in a debate. If someone’s ideas are worth insulting, then surely they are worth rationally rebutting first.

Calling someone a misogynist, a cult leader, a racist – we all understand that none of these are arguments; they are confessions of intellectual cowardice and impotence. If you show up to an oncologist  to have him remove a deadly tumour, and he spends half an hour verbally insulting it, would you consider yourself cured? If you go to an optometrist to get help with blurry vision, is your problem solved if your optometrist merely rails against the greed of the eyeglass industry, or says that all vision is merely subjective, so how do you really know that your vision is blurry?

Another trick is to call someone “overambitious” or “grandiose,” or to imply that the problem is far more complex than he assumes – without addressing the content of his arguments. I am fully aware that I have taken on enormous philosophical problems in this book and claimed to have solved them. This is an ambitious project to be sure – calling it “overambitious” is not an argument.

Another trick is to call an argument “incomplete,” which is a variation of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. All arguments are “incomplete,” because language has limitations, we are mortal, readers have lives to live, and all resources are finite. I may not have read arguments for determinism written in ancient Aramaic, or I may have failed to address the ethical arguments of a particular Indian philosopher – and I may not have rebutted some article against me – but so what? If the definition of “complete” is pretty much synonymous with “omniscient,” it can be safely discarded as a ridiculous standard. Dragging thinkers off to continually research and respond to everyone else’s thoughts is just a silly way of ensuring that thinkers remain cripplingly unoriginal. If you cannot paint a picture of a boat until you have lived at sea, studied the history of boating, and learned the details of every other picture of a boat, then clearly the purpose of all those restrictions is to stop you from painting your own picture of a boat.

It’s a trap!

Let us say that a man named David comes up with an argument called X. Let us say that you wish to oppose argument X, but without actually engaging with the content of the argument – here is another silly trick. Find some other argument that David has made that is generally unpopular – we can call this Y. Now, instead of engaging with argument X, you can instead wave around the red flag of argument Y, and hope – usually correctly – that the resulting howls of mob outrage about argument Y drown out your lack of rational rebuttal to argument X.

Another approach is to create a fiery language moat of ostracism around David, to the point where no one feels safe engaging with him. If you can portray David as so crazy, so evil, so malevolent and so ridiculous that to even engage with him is to give him more credibility than he deserves, then you can sink original thought in the foggy canyons of social aversion. This is not always an incorrect position – since such crazy people certainly exist – but it is invalid in the face of significant popularity. I do not spend any time rebutting the personal paranoias of inconsequential individuals – but when someone like Karl Marx remains so popular, he is prominent enough to deserve exposure and rebuttal.

Here is another way you can avoid getting into the ring with a strong thinker – find the least popular person who likes that thinker’s arguments, and then promote that unpopular person as a “guilt by association” representative. If David Duke retweeted you once, that means that you and David Duke are pretty much the same person! The beauty of this cowardly move is that you never have to apply it to the thinkers that you like – such as Barack Obama and his association with Louis Farrakhan.

Exposing the personal hypocrisies of your opponents can also be a rich vein of avoidance-mining. If Albert rails against government subsidies, but once had a job at a company that took government subsidies, you can just point out that fact and think you have done something to dismantle Albert’s arguments against government subsidies. As before, the beauty of this is that you never have to apply it to those you like. Karl Marx, while simultaneously railing against the exploitation of workers by bosses, impregnated his maid, then tossed her out into the street. This is not brought up by Marxists, of course, but any remote inconsistency on the part of their opponents is shot into peoples’ eyeballs like reddish fireworks.

Pointing out that someone has been wrong in the past can also be a good way of getting out of a potentially humiliating debate. Being wrong is a natural consequence of making arguments – to wait for perfection is to stagnate in perpetuity. Could we have gotten to Einsteinian physics without going through Newtonian physics? It is doubtful. Saying that someone is wrong now because he has been wrong in the past is like saying you can easily beat a world champion boxer because he once lost a fight in the past.

Perhaps your intellectual opponent has an esoteric area of interest that has nothing to do with his current argument, which you can highlight with the goal of insulting his general competence. Sir Isaac Newton was obsessed with alchemy and mysticism. Is it not far easier to point that out than to learn and rebut his general mathematical and physical theories? Christopher Hitchens was ridiculously enamored of the child murderer Che Guevara, but that has little relevance to Hitchens’s argument against the existence of God. If Hitchens claims to be a good judge of character, this can certainly be brought up as a counterexample, but its scope should be limited to the argument at hand.

Pointing out that a moralist has done something immoral does not necessarily invalidate that moralist’s ethical theories. If a televangelist who rails against infidelity has an affair, this does not automatically invalidate all of his prior arguments against infidelity – especially since Christianity itself states that everyone is a sinner and temptation is everywhere. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s grandson committed suicide – I have heard this fact used to support spanking, since Dr. Spock disapproved of the practice.

Not an argument.

At an even baser level, you can use flattering photographs of intellectuals you like, while using unflattering photographs of those you dislike. You can use positive adjectives to describe those who agree with you, while using negative adjectives to describe those who oppose you. For example, I have been described in the mainstream media as “a former IT worker.” I co-founded and grew a successful software company, like Steve Jobs, but I have never seen Steve Jobs referred to as “a former IT worker.”

If you like a thinker, you can quote his admirers – if you dislike a thinker, you can quote his detractors.

If you dislike a group of thinkers, you can create a label to describe them, and then infuse that label with as many pejoratives as possible. For instance, you can call people part of the “far right,” “extreme right,” or “alt-right,” and then hope – usually successfully – that people’s internal autocorrect transforms those labels into the ideologically required “fascist” or “Nazi.” You can label anyone who wishes to preserve his country’s culture as “far right/Nazi,” and then hope no one notices that Israel has a very strong desire to preserve its own culture, which means that, in this insane formulation, Jews are in fact Nazis.

You can also deride everyone on the left as a “snowflake,” even when leftists have powerful and legitimate criticisms of Western imperialism, traditional Republican warmongering and the military-industrial complex.

You can also divide a group of thinkers into “acceptable” and “unacceptable,” and woo those you deem acceptable with favourable articles and attractive photographs, in the hope – usually successful – that they will then start avoiding those you deem unacceptable. Bribing selected people with positive coverage is a great way of splitting a movement and turning it against itself.

Another way to deplatform a thinker is to manufacture a hysterical controversy and then continually refer to that controversy in the future. Repetition sinks reputation, and actual arguments are never addressed. This also serves as a standing threat against anyone who even dreams of taking a similar position.

Inevitably, you will hear that my arguments are reductionist, or simplistic, or incomplete, or that I have not addressed so-and-so’s argument, or that I have a bad reputation, or that I am not a philosopher, or that I avoid legitimate debates, or I am disliked, or I am grandiose, or that I was wrong about something sometime, or someone bad liked something I said once. You name it – the mud is thrown, while only hitting the gullible and ignorant.

Do not fall for the silly tricks. Do what I do – just skim the article, or speed up the audio, and see whether any actual arguments are addressed.

If not, just understand that the words are a foolish moat around a necessary treasure – and that the writer or the speaker is a mere fool, full of sound and fury, whose life signifies nothing but cowardice.

---

^[1] K. N. Smith. “Your Political Beliefs Are Partly Shaped By Genetics.” D-brief. August 5, 2015. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/08/05/political-beliefs-genetic/.

^[2] Hanna Rosin. “Men Are Raped Almost as Often as Women in America. We Need to Talk About This.” Slate Magazine. April 29, 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

^[3] M. Lipka. “10 facts about atheists.” Pew Research Center. June 1, 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/01/10-facts-about-atheists/

A Manual for New Tax Farmers

Hey - seriously - congratulations on your new political post!

If you are reading this, it means that you have ascended to the highest levels of government, so it's really, really important that you don't do or say anything stupid, and screw things up for the rest of us.

The first thing to remember is that you are a figurehead, about as relevant to the direction of the state as a hood ornament is to the direction of a car - but you are a very important distraction, the "smiling face" of the fist of power. So hold your nose, kiss the babies, and just think how good you would look on a stamp. A stamp, for mail... No, not email, mail. Never mind, we'll explain later.

Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand the true history of political power, so you don't accidentally act on the naïve idealism you are required to project to the general public.

Human Livestock - A History of Tax Farming

The reality of political power is very simple: bad farmers own crops and livestock - good farmers own human beings.

This is not nearly as simple as it sounds, hence the need for this manual.

The very first thing to remember is that you are a mammal, an animal, and like all animals, you want to maximize consumption while minimizing effort. By far the most effective way to do this is to take from other people, just as a farmer takes milk and meat from cows.

In the dawn of history, this predation occurred in the most base manner, through brute cannibalism. While this may have proven effective in the short run, it fell prey to the problem of consuming your seed crop, in that it provided only a few meals, whilst re-growing more human livestock took over a decade.

And, it was pretty gross. Sometimes, even after you washed your food, it was too smelly to eat. (Interesting fact: deodorant was first invented as marinade.)

The husbandry of human ownership took a giant leap forward with the invention of slavery, which was a step up from cannibalism because instead of using people as food, it used people to grow food, which was a much more sustainable model, to say the least. And far less smelly.

Slavery was an improvement to be sure, but it limited the growth of the ruling class because it could not solve the problem of motivation. Turns out, if you treat people like a machine, they end up with the motivation of a machine, which is to break two days after the warranty ends, haha.

Anyhoo, the basic reality of human ownership is this:

1. First, you must first subdue the masses through force

2. Then, you maintain that subjugation through the psychological power of ethics.

People think that ethics were invented to make people good, but that's like saying that chastity belts were invented to spread STDs. No, no - ethics were invented to bind the minds of the slaves, and to create the only true shackles we rulers need: guilt, self-attack and a fear of the tyranny of ethics. Whoever teaches ethics rules the herd, because everyone is afraid of bad opinions, mostly from themselves. If you do it right, no judgment will be as evil or endless as the one coming from the mirror.

This is all fairly straightforward - however, the ethics required to control slaves requires the creation of a paradise after death that they can look forward to, if only they continue to obey their masters. This harvests the muscles of the slaves, but not their minds, which remain depressed and alienated and otherworldly and, well, economically fairly useless. Basically, you're saying "Hey, let's double down, shall we? I'll trade you pretty much everything in this life for everything in the afterlife, mmmkay?" It really only takes a moment's thought to realize that anyone making that deal has no belief in the afterlife - I mean, look at the gold palaces of the Pope, for heaven's sake! - but frankly, a moment's thought appears to be a moment too long for most people.

Tragically, slavery had its limits. Slaves have to be treated as apes that can be verbally commanded, which provides the ruling classes sophisticated control over their muscles, but permanently breaks the most valuable resource of the human crop - their minds.

The Roman Empire perfected the slave-owning model, but inevitably ended up creating too many dependent slaves, which triggered the slow economic collapse of the entire system. (For more on this, see the section on current conditions below.)

After the Dark Ages, when the ruling classes had to suffer the indignity of retreating into the dank attics of the Church, the feudal model emerged.

The feudal approach improved on the direct slave-owning model by granting the human livestock ("serfs") nominal ownership over land, while taking a portion of their productivity through taxes, military conscription, user fees for grinding grain and so on. So instead of owning folks directly, we just let them sweat themselves into puddles on their little ancestral plots, then took whatever we wanted from the proceeds -- all the while telling them, of course, that God Himself appointed us as masters over them, and that their highest virtue was meek subservience to their anointed masters, blah blah. Again, you might be thinking that, historically, God seems to have had a very soft spot for the most violent, entitled and warlike of His flock - and if meek submission was a virtue, why was it not practiced by the rulers, and so on, but don't worry; you need to just put these entirely natural thoughts right out of your head, because once the people become enslaved, basic reasoning just short-circuits in their tiny minds, so that they do not see the cramped horrors of their little lives.

Anyway, the evolution of medieval serfdom split society into four basic groups:

1. The ruling class (aristocracy);

2. The church (propaganda);

3. The army (enforcement) - and;

4. The serfs (livestock).

The aristocracy - of which you are now a proud member - reaped the rewards; the Church controlled the slaves through ethics; the Army attacked those not subjugated through ethics, and the Serfs paid for the whole show. (The modern equivalents are: the political masters, the media, the police and the taxpayers.)

Since they had partial custodianship of the land, medieval serfs had at least some incentive to optimize their agricultural productivity, and so starting from about the 12th century, significant increases in farm production created the excess food required for the development of cities, the natural home of the ruling classes.

The economic development of cities remained dependent upon the rediscovered Roman law, which was not a free market/private property legal system, and so economic productivity remained relatively stagnant, at least compared to the 18th century to the present.

Medieval guilds were ridiculously inefficient, forcing father-to-son transmission of livelihoods, requiring ridiculously lengthy apprenticeships designed to raise barriers to entry, denying advertising and marketing opportunities, and so on.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church had banned usury, or the lending of money for interest, which prevented investment in economic improvements. (This was largely due to the fact that the Church, and the Aristocracy it served, did not want to pay interest on its debts.)

(All of these early economic inefficiencies hindered the development of democracy, which requires enormous reserves of capital, used as collateral to bribe voters in the present with the money of the future.)

The splintering of Christendom into warring factions during the Reformation created new opportunities for capital accumulation and loans, and the economic warfare that resulted was really a conflict between medieval capital inefficiencies and the new investment efficiencies available under Protestantism - and Judaism to some degree. Naturally, the religion that was able to borrow the most won, and lending money for interest became an established practice throughout society, thus paving the way for the Industrial Revolution.

Also, after hundreds of years of bloody religious warfare where priests were effectively trying to gain control of the military might of the state, in order to impose their doctrines on everyone else, the separation of church and state became a matter of base survival. Prying religious doctrines away from government policies meant that some vaguely rational approaches to property rights and trade could be achieved, which gave rise to arguments for free trade, notably by Ricardo and Adam Smith.

When you stop trading in God, you can start trading in goods.

Starting in the 17th century, the agricultural productivity that the cities depended on began to falter. Serf landholdings were willed to sons, which created increasing fragmentation of properties, and inevitable inefficiencies in sowing and plowing. The ruling classes, eager to remain in the cities rather than go back to the damp and dirty countryside, forced the enclosure movement on the peasants, consolidating landholdings and driving hundreds of thousands of serfs off their ancestral lands. This almost immediately increased agricultural productivity, saving the cities - while creating a massive army of cheap labor which, having no land to farm anymore, inevitably ended up looking for work in towns.

The conditions were thus ripe for the Industrial Revolution - capital freedom, a mass of cheap labor, some free trade, excess food, and the growing religious skepticism which resulted from the wonderful advances of the scientific method, followed since the 16^th century.

It was at some point during this period that the greatest leap forward in human ownership came to pass, which was the simple genius of allowing the livestock to choose their own occupations.

At one fell swoop, the problem of livestock motivation was largely solved - at least until the present. Rather than eat the human livestock, or own them directly, or force them into specific occupations, a free market was created for the source of wealth, while the enslavement aspect was shifted to the effects of wealth, i.e. wages and capital.

Labor was free, wages were taxed - this was the greatest leap forward in human farming history! All prior ruling classes were revealed as incompetent parasites, compared to the brilliant manipulations of the modern human harvester!

The economic predations of the ruling classes still remained, but became largely invisible. Tariffs and duties were buried in the prices paid by consumers, who had no comparison prices to see their effects. The softening of the visible whip to a kind of leeching fog gave the livestock the perception of freedom - and they all stampeded to work, to wealth, and to fatten our tables in a way we had never dreamed possible!

The trapped entrepreneurial energies of the human herd were thus unleashed for the first time in history, producing a staggering superabundance of wealth and products and services, portions of which were hoovered up to the ruling classes to a degree never before experienced!

The benefits were clear, the productivity increases astounding - but the complications of managing this semi-free horde of human livestock rose exponentially as well.

The first and greatest danger was the shift from aristocracy to meritocracy, or the reality that greater wealth could be accumulated through trade and creativity rather than tax pillaging and the control of state violence. (This was same danger faced by the Church in the shift from superstition to science.)

The rising entrepreneurial class created an uncomfortable split within society, in which the benefits of the aristocracy began to be openly questioned. Societies like America were founded without any aristocracy at all - and aristocracies across Europe faced mounting rebellions, and sometimes outright extinction.

The aristocracy did not want to crush the entrepreneurial class - since it was so wonderfully productive - but it could not allow itself to be eclipsed by these entrepreneurs, and so another unnamed genius came up with a delightfully playful solution called incorporation.

The entrepreneurial classes wanted to maximize their profits, of course, and sometimes this came at the expense of the workers. In the early 19th century, citizens had access to a common law legal system that allowed them to bring suit against their employers for death, mutilation, pollution and so on. The capitalists wanted to avoid these legal attacks of course, but no one wanted to explicitly strip the workers of these rights, otherwise they would become aware of their enslavement, and would lose their motivation, and we would be right back to the Middle Ages again, which no one wanted at all!

Across the Western world, government after government introduced the concept of incorporation, a brilliant stroke in the annals of human ownership! Incorporation created a legal fiction called a corporation which shielded entrepreneurs, capitalists, managers and owners from most legal repercussions for their misdeeds - and even losses within their businesses!

Entrepreneurs could now take money out of this "corporation" and keep it for themselves, while if any legal action succeeded against them, or their businesses lost money or went into debt, it was now the "corporation" and "shareholders" and employees that paid the price, and no one could ever come after their personal assets. It was like a casino where you kept your winnings, and strangers paid your losses.

In return for extending this legal shield to the capitalists, our political class took a cut in the form of corporate taxes - most of which came from dividends and wages of course. This effectively trapped the entrepreneurs in the service of the state, ensuring that they would never seek to eclipse or make redundant the political class, since they were now dependent upon State power for the maintenance of their legal shield and one-way economic privileges.

The 19th Century

The 19th Century was a wildly creative time in the history of human livestock ownership. The amazing productivity unleashed by the privatization of labor, and the partial socialization of wages, created such prosperity that the necessity of the ruling classes itself was called into question.

Furthermore, the increased education and economic initiatives of the working classes threatened the economic value of the managerial classes. The workers achieved almost complete literacy, and possessed excellent work ethics, legal knowledge and social networks, including the so-called Friendly Societies, which shielded the poor from destitution through any of life's many accidents.

The supply of those able to manage thus increased, which drove down the price of management - which was not exactly welcomed by the existing capitalists.

The traditional solution to increased competition from the poor was to ban books and education, inflict religious guilt about materialism, or start a war - none of which were politically or economically advantageous at the time. Openly banning education for the children of the poor would have reintroduced the "OMG I'm a total slave!" demotivation problem; religious belief was waning, while war would have destroyed all the new capital that the ruling and entrepreneurial classes were enjoying.

In a brilliant stroke, the ruling classes and the Church conspired to create a false educational "emergency." In conjunction with a large number of resentful and underperforming teachers, public school education was introduced with the stated goal of improving the skills, abilities and intelligence of the poor.

Naturally, the true goal was the exact opposite. Rather than focusing on practical, economic and entrepreneurial knowledge, government schools quickly shifted the educational focus towards patriotic history, rote memorization and recitation, Latin and Greek, and an endless plethora of other useless and boring trivia. This was the sports equivalent of forcing your competition to take naps instead of training, resulting in a truly delightful absence of competition for medals. Government schools created dull, resentful drones only fit for taking orders, so the threat to the managerial class was averted. (All this started in Prussia, which was medieval, mystical and militaristic, which should have been something of a clue for everyone, but again, thought hurts, apparently.)

One of the four pillars of the human farm, the Church, faced mounting challenges in the 19th century, as the increased secularism of the Industrial Revolution and the growth in the empirical value of the scientific method undermined the superstitious terrors of the Middle Ages.

Sensing that the power of their God was on the decline, the clergy began casting about for a new home. Their expertise was in sophistic ethics, remember, rather than political power, and so they came up with a wonderful idea that allowed them to bring their brilliant historical lies into politics, but without having to enter into the sordid knuckle fights of base democratic electioneering.

In a word: socialism.

Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god. It has its good and evil, its creation myths, its eventual heaven where the State withers away, its ruling class of ethical liars, and so on. Priest as Plato, you get the picture...

Suddenly, instead of heaven existing in the afterlife, it was promised in this life, as soon as government programs succeeded. (The afterlife is far more likely!) The new Socialist clergy promised an end to poverty, injustice, illiteracy, shortness, baldness - any word they could get their grubby hands on - and of course anyone who disagreed with these fantasies was immediately portrayed as pro poverty, injustice, illiteracy etc. Of course, just as the moral guilt of religion can never create virtue, government programs can never create paradise, and so a perpetual motion machine of social control was started, where the supposed "solutions" just created more of the same problems.

Religion and Kiddies

Religion has always been used to support and extend the power of the State, through a number of powerful psychological mechanisms, always inflicted on children.

First of all, in religion, success is guilt, and failure is legitimate need. Creating guilt among economically successful people plants a seed that flowers into a guilty parting with their property for the sake of "helping the poor." (Notably, priests never seem to get round to attacking their own successful head priests, or the successful political systems they support and enrich.)

Secondly, religion excels at creating nonexistent entities, and then promoting a class of specialized liars who claim to speak for those entities. Thus you have a "god," and a priest who speaks "for that god." In socialism, you have the poor, and you have those who speak "for the poor." (Notably, it doesn't really matter that socialists almost never come from "the poor," such as Marx and Engels, two unemployed rich kids who claimed to have earthshaking insights into the poverty-stricken working classes, who were actually getting richer.)

Thirdly priests, like politicians, promote arbitrary but universal ethics, while excluding themselves from the moral rules they impose, which is the most fundamental attribute of any ruling class, as we will see below.

Fourthly religion - again, like the State - promotes wonderful traps in the form of false dichotomies. For example, if you don't want to the State to steal your income in order to "help the poor," then according to religion you must hate the poor. This is like saying that if you object to getting raped, you must hate lovemaking.

We could go on with this, but since religion has been so thoroughly absorbed into the State in the form of socialism, there's little point in examining its medieval corpse.

The Modern World

In the past, society was so poor that the aristocracy had to be hereditary in order to maintain its economic wealth - this is no longer the case, due to the massive productivity increases of the relatively free market. Now, a successful politician can easily gather enough wealth to last several generations - or forever if handled wisely - in just a few terms. This has allowed for the development of the illusion that the tax livestock control something we call "democracy."

Because we can steal so much wealth in such a short amount of time, the ruling classes have agreed to rotate in and out of power, in order to maintain the illusion that there is no ruling class. This rotation is essential to maintaining the optimism of the livestock by giving them the belief - almost always false - that they too can join the ruling class. This means that the ruling class is no longer directly exclusive, but rather somewhat permeable, at least at the fringes.

(The modern democratic system has the advantage of transferring literally trillions of dollars from the workers to the rulers - a plunder unprecedented in human history - but the logic of our system is inherently self-destructive, which is why it is important for you, as a new political leader, to make sure that you extract as much money as possible before the whole house of cards comes crashing down. We will tell you how to do this later.)

The democratic system only really came into its own with the abandonment of the gold standard, and the introduction of merely paper currency. Governments in the 19th century - and before - were limited in the amount they could bribe supporters and dependents by the amount of gold they had in their vaults. Gold cannot be created by printing presses, and so abandoning the gold standard (the capacity for citizens to redeem paper money for gold) allowed the printing presses of government bribery to work overtime, creating a good deal of the so-called "wealth" of the post Second World War period.

Democratic governments - like all governments - are all about the forced transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive. When the creation of money was limited by actual gold, it was more or less a zero-sum game. When you stole from one group to give to another - always taking your cut - it was a direct reduction and increase of wealth in the present, which was not only highly evident, but also gave the group being stolen from a good deal of incentive to fight the theft.

With the introduction of fiat currency, this all changed. The unimaginative ascribed this to the advent of Keynesianism, but the truth is that fiat currencies predated Keynesianism, and Keynesianism was merely the intellectual cover for the greatest intergenerational theft in history.

When governments can print their own money, politicians can sell future generations off to bribe supporters in the present - and shaft the poor at the same time! If the government adds 5% to the currency in circulation, those closest to the government get to spend that money first - at the prior valuation, before inflation hits - and then, as the additional money spreads through the economy, the price of everything rises, since you have more money relative to goods than you had before, and those at the bottom and the outskirts of the economy - generally the poor, and those on fixed incomes - get hit the hardest.

Thus printing money serves two major purposes - first, it gives free cash to politicians to bribe their supporters; second, it creates and exacerbates poverty on the outskirts of the economy, thus giving an excuse for politicians to raise taxes, create more government programs (and thus more supporters and dependents) and print more money, thus closing the circle.

Fiat currency also allows for luxurious indulgences in social engineering - you can create "wars" on everything (since war is the health of the State, just as the State is the health of war) - drugs, poverty, prostitution, gambling, illiteracy, sickness - whatever. This creates more and more people dependent on State payouts, and scares everyone through terrifying attacks on ordinary human vices. It also changes the kinds of people who want to become enforcers - sorry, "cops" - but again, more on that later.

Unfortunately, the relationship between increases in the money supply and inflation has been too well established and understood to be of much use anymore. Capital markets are always on the lookout for the overprinting of money, and punish governments by increasing the price of their bonds, or downgrading their credit ratings. This is just another reason why we are approaching the end of the current cycle of human ownership.

The second trick that governments can use to bribe those around them is to refrain from pumping money directly into the economy, but rather to create imaginary money, and use it to buy their own government bonds. All this does is push the liability of the repayment of bonds - both interest and principal - into the future. It is a mere accounting trick, like just about everything else the government does, but fools more than enough people to keep the game going just a little bit longer.

Democracy and Bribery - But I Repeat Myself...

Every politician must promise, say, three dollars in benefits for every dollar taken in taxes. This is utterly impossible, of course, since the government has no money of its own, and is ridiculously inefficient at everything it tries - so it is only through borrowing or printing money that politicians are able to bribe voters into imagining that the government produces wealth. The introduction of fiat currency, and the modern banking system, protected by government-controlled cartels - as well as the legal shield called the "corporation" - has been a godsend to modern politicians, since it allows the costs of present day bribery to be pushed off decades or even generations into the future. This has been a complete no-brainer for everyone involved - free bribe money, paid for by strangers who haven't even been born yet, is a temptation too lucrative and consequence-free to even imagine resisting.

Technically, democracy is a money-drug addiction that wages war on drugs far less addictive and destructive.

This is the End...

Unfortunately - and you will see this as an inevitable pattern of the ruling classes' use of violence - this unsustainable system is nearing the end of its current cycle.

The problem is that the consequences of these inevitable national debts are producing medieval conditions once again. First of all, the economic engine of the productive classes - access to capital - is failing, because governments are stealing all the capital in order to bribe voters. It's true that voters then often buy stuff, but that's not quite the same as driving new entrepreneurial development, since voters don't invest in new businesses, but rather buy products from existing businesses - which is yet another reason why existing businesses are big fans of the government!

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the issue of livestock de-motivation is raising its ugly head once more. Young people now instinctively grasp the economic catastrophes ahead, and this blunts their ambition and creativity to the point where fewer and fewer new entrepreneurs are creating wealth for the ruling classes.

Birthrates

To rulers, the most fundamental capital is not money, but people (or, more accurately, children, but we will get to that below.)

Reasonably intelligent human beings do not breed well in captivity, which is why the birthrates of modern Western nations have crashed so catastrophically. Those of us in the ruling class obviously want human livestock intelligent enough to create wealth for us - but unfortunately that kind of intelligence is also easily high enough to do a rational calculation on the benefits and costs of modern parenthood.

In the current system, most parents have to work outside the home in order to sustain even a middle-class existence, because of enormously high taxation, regulation, inflation, debt and economic controls. So parents don't get to spend days with their children, but instead get them for the evenings, night times and mornings, which are in general the least enjoyable times for parenting, particularly when you have to rush kids out of the house to daycare or school. Parents work a full day, get stuck on the terrible roads we built for them, stressed out because they don't want to be late picking up their kids, then bring their kids home, and cook and feed and bathe them, and then try and get them to bed - with precious little playtime. Mom and dad then fall into an exhausted, sexless bed, praying that their children don't wake up at night - and then have to rouse them at an artificial time, get them fed and clothed and out the door on a strict schedule - all of which is anathema to children - and then pay a significant amount of their after-tax income for strangers to take care of the children they so rarely see!

It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is a pretty raw deal for parents, and this is the most fundamental reason why birthrates among our tax cattle are so low - except among the poor, who we pay to breed, so that we can use them to guilt the better-off into surrendering their money to us.

Thus we have de-motivated young people, who spend forever draining wealth - their own and others' - in school and university; fewer babies and children, and a massive bulge of baby boomers heading into retirement, where a completely empty cupboard awaits them.

Citizens can easily understand how impossible this all is, but they shy away from confronting it, or demanding that we change it - or even admitting it - because they're all so guilty at having accepted bribes their whole life, and because parents so rarely want to admit to their kids that they have royally screwed them out of a future, and sold them off to strangers for cut-rate park admissions. These aging citizens need the next generation to pay for their own retirement, but are leaving them with a cratered economy, growing state power and massive national debts, and so to admit guilt would mean - at any reasonable moral level - withdrawing their demands for retirement funding. If a man steals a woman's car, any real apology requires that he give it back - but this is never going to happen with the national debt, or the trillions in unfunded liabilities, and so no one with any real influence is ever going to demand that we deal with this impossible situation.

Democracy is all about the guilty and shameful pillaging of the helpless and unborn; it corrupts moral responsibility to the point where almost everyone is far too guilty and entitled to take a moral stand for accountability.

Get a man to take stolen goods, and he will never complain about theft. This is the essence of democracy.

So - no worries there.

The Dependent Classes

A key foundation of livestock management is bribery, which has an obvious benefit - and a subtle one. The obvious benefit is that, say, artists and intellectuals who receive government money will never be fundamentally critical of government taxes and redistribution, for reasons too obvious to mention here. The more subtle benefit is that when you create an entire class of people dependent on government handouts, you divide the livestock into warring factions. Those whose money is being stolen have a strong incentive to reduce State theft, while those who receive stolen money have a strong incentive to increase State theft.

It is absolutely, absolutely essential that you create and maintain conditions which foster slave on slave aggression. If rulers smack down the slaves directly, the livestock immediately become aware of their enslavement, which reintroduces the motivation problem. Efficient human masters thus ensure that the slaves attack each other - the benefits of this are almost too numerous to count, but a few will be mentioned below.

Human beings, as interdependent tribal mammals, have evolved to be terrified of horizontal social attack, ostracism and rejection. This is a core emotional vulnerability which can never be eliminated, and will always serve you well.

Prehistoric man could not live without the support of the tribe, and so the need for social acceptance was programmed into the very base of his brain, as a core survival mechanism. The philosophers who serve power - mostly priests and academics - have layered onto this basic mechanism the additional power of ethics.

Ethics is a claim to a universal principle of preferred behavior, which has the enormous benefit of being easily internalized by the slave classes. If you can get slaves to attack themselves for daring to question the existing social structure, you will not have to lift a finger to keep them in their chains - they will in fact attack anyone holding a key!

As a backup, you must always have a group of slaves willing to attack anyone who mentally frees himself from your false ethics. This enforcement will always come from two main areas: the family and the media.

The Slave Family

Deep down, slaves always know that they're slaves, and their only real enslavement is resisting this knowledge. Prior ruling classes did not trust this basic mechanism, and so were hesitant to substitute horizontal social control for vertical political violence.

Now, we know better.

All commonly accepted cultural myths are created by the ruling class, are essential lubricants for the wheels of power.

The most common cultural myth is that your family is everything, the most important relationship, the most essential intimacy, the most fundamental social unit.

This helps the ruling class in countless ways - not least of which is that it establishes and extends the principle that an accident of birth creates a fundamental and eternal moral obligation; "family" thus equals "country." (Also: "sports team," which is one reason why we fund them.)

Once you have enslaved one generation, most parents will almost inevitably resist the freedom of the next generation, out of guilt and shame about their own surrender.

We tell people to stay close to their families, because their families will so often attack them for even thinking about leaving the cages of collective history.

Let's look at the sequence.

A man surrenders his liberty for petty cash and the illusion of security. He then becomes a father. His son questions his father's moral courage and integrity, and the father then attacks the son, chaining them in a cage they both rot in.

For this cycle to be maintained, we must forever tell the son that his family is the most important thing in the world - more important than reason, evidence, truth, integrity, morality - you name it! If he believes us, and if his family is not committed to his freedom, we (and they) will own him forever.

This is the basic deal we offer to parents, just like priests: give us your kids, and we'll teach them to honor and obey you no matter what, so you don't actually have to be a good person and earn their respect.

(True, not all parents take this unholy deal, but we just get the media to mock the homeschooled kids and all is well.)

Furthermore, given the billions of people ensnared in the dependent classes the world over, it is a near-certainty that at least one or more close family members will be dependent upon the existing system, and will then violently attack anyone who questions the morality and practicality of predatory democracy. Want to privatize education? Say hi to your teacher Aunt Mamie, and let the fun begin!

The Media

A few people, however, will retain the strength to emerge from the slave class, and - particularly given the communications opportunities of the Internet - may start broadcasting their message to a wider audience - in which case, it's important to pull the emergency backup attack switch called the "mainstream media."

How do you create slave on slave violence through the mainstream media?

Again, subtlety and trust in the inevitability of human psychology is the key.

First of all, you must never directly censor and control the media, or its inhabitants may rebel against your authority, and reveal your naked aggression. Once the knowledge of slavery becomes inescapable, society inevitably and immediately changes - and hiding this knowledge is the entire art and science of human ownership.

Thus you need to create a slow and increasing economic dependence in the media, rather than arresting and imprisoning its members.

You do this by making reporters more and more dependent upon information from the government. It is much, much cheaper to simply rewrite a governmental press release than it is to spend weeks or months going undercover, interviewing subjects, verifying sources, and exposing yourself to legal complications in order to break a story outside the normal channels of communication.

Furthermore, as State power grows, more and more people become more and more interested in what the government says and does, since they are investors or business people whose fortunes rise and fall on the whims of the ruling class.

This process can be a little risky at first, but you only need a decade or two in order for it to become almost universal and irreversible.

Remember - it takes a pretty empty person to rewrite government press releases for a living, and fairly delusionary managers to pretend that they are not the mere amplifiers of the whispers of power. Once these managers assume their positions, they will inevitably reject any energetic truth seekers, and instinctively seek out and employ other empty rewriters of State edicts. The collective delusion that they're still producing "news" becomes progressively stronger, to the point where they will rail against and attack anyone who actually tries to publish something that is true, particularly if it threatens the government contacts who supply their disinformation.

Access to government thus becomes the foundation of any media organization - therefore no fundamental criticisms of government can be produced. You can criticize a tax, but not taxation itself. You can criticize a party, but not the State. You can criticize a vote, but not voting.

As usual, it is both depressing and exciting to see the tiny price that people are willing to sell themselves for - their name in print, a meager expense account, a few parties, and they are yours.

The physical abuse required to keep the sheep in line is doled out by the police - the verbal abuse is doled out by the media.

The media has been trained to attack anyone who questions the foundations of violent power. The equation is really very simple - so simple that it is always overlooked. If a man says that coercive wealth transfers - theft, in the vernacular - are wrong, then the media instantly attacks him for not caring about whoever is receiving the stolen money.

For instance, if a man questions the morality and practicality of the welfare state, he will be immediately attacked for not caring about the poor. If he argues against government schools, then he clearly hates the fact that children get educated. If he defends free-trade, he is an immoral advocate for bloodsucking corporations; if he criticizes military budgets, he is a cowardly appeaser who wishes to surrender Fort Knox to Al Qaeda; if he holds people morally accountable for their actions, he is punishing them for their past mistakes and "playing the blame game"; if he refuses to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers, he is nursing a grudge and so on.

If he argues that adult relationships are voluntary, then he is viciously anti-community; if he says that abuse should not be tolerated in relationships, then he is an intolerant absolutist bent on destroying all relationships...

This list can go on and on and on - and Lord knows it does, every day - but you get the point.

The wonderful thing is that you won't ever have to tell the media to do this - it just happens of its own accord, because people who are expert verbal abusers always rise to the top of the media pyramid, because they are so useful to those of us in power, so we always give them access and exclusivity.

You only need a few verbal abusers in charge, and everyone else will fall in line, because anyone who tries to stand up against them will be immediately smacked down, and will face the horrifying spectacle of watching all of their colleagues either take cowardly steps back, or joining in the verbal assaults.

(I should probably have mentioned that priests - the best verbal abusers in history - left the church for socialism and the media, which is why the media tends to be so left-wing.)

The reason the media performs this service for us is very simple - we own their livelihoods through licensing, legal regulation and access to information. If we decide to cut anyone off, his career is over. If anyone displeases us, we can threaten to pull the license of the entire organization, because the rules are so Byzantine that we can nail someone for something at any time - much like tax code, it is a form of soft totalitarianism that we have perfected over the generations.

The purpose of regulation is to control through rational anxiety rather than dictatorial terror. Prior dictatorships would shoot people, arrest and imprison them arbitrarily - this controlled people's bodies very effectively, but destroyed their entrepreneurial energies and motivations.

It is far more effective to regulate and license and tax - and this is true for all industries - because potential dissidents then face their own foggy walls of vague anxiety - in which they will not face arrest and imprisonment, but rather lengthy legal complications, which they may eventually win, but which drain much of the joy out of living while they go on, month after month, year after year.

This is true for public-sector unions as well - we don't make it illegal for a manager to fire a unionized employee, because that would expose the system for the economic joke that it is - we just make it really, really lengthy and complicated and emotionally draining and confrontational and exhausting - that is the true perfection of soft totalitarianism. People will surrender to anxiety and still vaguely feel free - if you terrorize them directly, they tend to just collapse intellectually and emotionally.

If the media were directly owned by the government, the propaganda would be clear; the indirect "ownership" of licensing and access to information is far more effective and powerful, because it maintains the veneer of independence and critical thinking.

This form of indirect ownership is the essence of modern democratic tax farming.

It is a central truism of human nature that people always attack what they avoid - if a reporter imagines that he is some sort of freethinking iconoclast, he is in complete denial about the reality of his enslavement. This denial always manifests itself in hysterical attacks against anyone who dares to point it out, or who is actually a freethinker.

To sum up - if we attack the slaves, we lose - if the slaves attack each other, which is so easy to orchestrate - we win, at least for a time.

Children: The Greatest Resource

When we say that human beings are the greatest resource, it's important to be precise about what we mean.

Human beings are naturally born with two characteristics - the first is a resistance to arbitrary authority, and the second is a natural susceptibility to obeying universal ethics.

Anyone who doubts the first characteristic has never tried to parent a two-year-old, and anyone who doubts the second has never triggered or experienced moral guilt.

Domesticating the human animal does not mean that everyone needs to turn out the same - in fact, it would be quite a disaster for us if they did.

To most efficiently control the human farm, you need a majority of broken, self-attacking, insecure, shallow, vain and ambitious sheep, forever consumed by inconsequentialities like weight, abs and celebrities - and a minority of volatile, angry and dominant sheepdogs, which you can dress up in either a green or a blue costume, and use to threaten and manage the herd.

Ruling classes have always had to separate children from their parents, otherwise it is almost impossible to substitute weird abstractions like "the state" or "a god" for the parent-child bond. Human children, like ducklings, will bond with whatever person or institution raises them, which is why we always need to get children - hopefully as young as possible - to bond with the State through government daycare and... "education" I guess is the closest word.

In the distant past, rulers made the error of forcibly removing children from their parents, which exposed their enslavement, and so destroyed their motivation. In the late Middle Ages, children were farmed out to wet-nurses, destroying the parent-child bond. In more recent times, the boarding school system separated children from their parents, destroying empathy and creating wonderfully brutal administrators and enforcers for a variety of European empires. (See: George Orwell.)

In our constant quest to perfect human ownership, we have found a far better way to break these family bonds, and substitute allegiance to ourselves, in the form of patriotism and/or religiosity.

It's one of those beautiful win-win situations that come along so rarely - first, we raised taxes to the point where it became very difficult to maintain a reasonable lifestyle if one parent stayed home with the children. We also funded feminist groups to the tune of billions of dollars - one of the greatest investments we ever made - to encourage women to abandon their children and enter the workforce.

Not only did this help break the parent-child bond, but it also moved women's labor from nontaxable to taxable - a delightful coincidence of self-interest and practicality for us!

With both parents working, all we had to do was create a few scares about the quality of child care, allowing us to move in to control and regulate that industry, remaking it to serve us best.

In some countries, like the United States, children are effectively removed from parental care by the state within a few weeks or months after birth - in other countries, parents receive direct subsidies to stay at home, which is quite funny when you think about it (and there is precious little room for humor in much of this). We take money by force from the parents, keep a large portion for ourselves, use another portion to run up debts that their children will somehow have to pay off - and then dribble a few pennies down to the mother, who then feels that we are somehow doing her a great favor by allowing her to stay at home!

It is a delicious irony that everyone remains so totally blind to reality that they run to us to protect their children from all kinds of harm, while we are the ones selling off their children's future through national debts! It really is like hiring a thief to guard your property, and the amazing thing is that this is all so completely obvious, and never, ever spoken about!

Sometimes, it would be tempting to feel bad about ruling people, but really, they are so very stupid that it seems almost helpful.

Parenting has generally improved over the centuries, which also poses a grave threat to us, because if children are raised without aggression, they will both immediately see, and never accept, the reality of human ownership.

As parenting has improved, it has become more important for us to intervene earlier and earlier. In the 19th century, it was okay to wait until the tax kittens were five or six before we started propagandizing them in government schools. However, as parenting has improved - particularly in the post-Second World War period, we have had to start intervening earlier and earlier, which is why we try and get at kids so soon after birth now.

When kids were raised fairly well in the post-war period, it produced the disasters of the rebellious 1960s, which almost finished us, and so we began funding radical feminism, controlling teachers more and snatching the kids earlier and earlier to fix all that.

So - we need some parents to create the sheep, and other parents to create the wolves, or the sociopaths who can be relied upon to attack whoever we point to. These sociopaths can be divided into those who guard the ruling class (the police and soldiers and prison guards and so on) - and the criminals that we always wave around to frighten people into running back to our "protection."

Again, the amount of doublethink required to maintain the delusion that the ruling class is not invested in crime - when even by our rules, we are all criminals - is really quite astounding! Governments control almost the entire environment of the poor, from public housing to food stamps to welfare checks to public schools - and it is this environment that produces the majority of criminals! For instance, governments require that children spend about 15,000 hours being educated in state schools, and yet when they emerge from this massive investment as illiterate and violent criminals, no one ever takes us to task!

Never, ever underestimate the degree to which people will scatter themselves into a deep fog in order to avoid seeing the basic realities of their own cages.

The strongest lock on the prison is always avoidance, not force.

Never-Never Land

Imagine a world in which almost all children were raised peacefully - there would be no criminals, no police, no soldiers, no politicians (or others with a bottomless lust for power) - no bullying in the workplace, no white-collar predations on the general wealth, no assault, no rape, no murder, no theft, no drug abuse, no smoking, no alcoholism, no eating disorders, no pedophilia, far fewer mental and physical health issues, very little divorce, promiscuity or infidelity - since all of these dysfunctions can be directly traced back to early childhood traumas.

What need would such a world have for rulers?

That is the world we can never allow to come into existence.

Anything we can do to traumatize children serves the hierarchical violence of our power.

Getting kids into daycare is a great start, since daycare makes children continually ill, exposes them to the wild aggressions of dozens of other children, destroys the one-on-one time that children need for bonding and emotional maturity. Daycare kids remain insecure, unbonded with a consistent caregiver (since teacher turnover is so high), and end up inevitably placing more emphasis on peer relationships than they do on adult caregiver relationships - including their parents.

These peer relationships among kids inevitably devolve to the lowest common denominator, with bullies and manipulators and the physically attractive rising to the top, and the sensitive and intelligent and empathetic hiding under tables. Children quickly perceive that adult attention is almost always negative - in other words that they themselves are negative - serving only to increase the stress of their caregivers. Due to the shortage of time and resources, conflicts between children are rarely resolved in a just manner, but merely with separation and mutual punishment, which breaks the child's natural desire for integrity and virtue, and places all the power in the fists of those empty and dangerous children who do not fear retribution.

When the stressed-out parent comes to pick up the child from daycare, the child feels further devalued, knowing that he is just another source of aggravation for his parent ("Just get in the car!"). The practical necessities of child raising are then compressed into a very short and taxing time, which no one really enjoys. Parents are short-tempered and impatient, children are stressed and unhappy, and then the whole thing starts all over again when the alarm bells go off the next morning.

Children have to feel herded and controlled by impatient adult caregivers long before we get a hold of them in schools, otherwise our whole system will fall apart.

Children have to feel that they are inconvenient impositions on all-powerful authorities long before they become adults - or even schoolchildren - otherwise we will have no control over them.

Children have to feel grateful for whatever crumbs of attention and consideration fall their way, and learn to live on very little, otherwise they will never grow up with the desperate hunger that can only be filled by conformity, patriotism, sports addictions, religions and other superstitions.

We plant children; we grow power.

Rule by Adjective

The violence of the government can create nothing, so all we can do is manipulate language. This is called the "rule by adjective," or RBA.

RBA essentially consists of the creation of noble sounding phrases that completely disintegrate under the slightest rational or empirical examination. The goal is to use wording that sounds like the tagline of a B-grade action movie, but with flags.

A few examples we are particularly proud of:

· "Building a bridge to the 21st century."

· "[insert country here] has a date with destiny."

· "No dream is beyond our reach."

· "We're one people bound together by a common set of ideas."

· "Let's celebrate our diversity."

In crafting political language, it's essential to play upon personal relationships, and pretend that the farmers and the sheep are all one big happy family, and that anyone who expresses skepticism or disagreements is not a "team player," and does not want to achieve anything noble or great or good or unselfish. For example:

· "There may be naysayers among us who say that we cannot achieve these great things together, but I say that history will prove them wrong, that the spirit of creativity and unity still lives within our people, and that the final chapter of our civilization has yet to be written!" etc etc.

Notice that no substantial criticism is ever addressed - rather, sly slander is continually layered over the objection until whoever objects is just kind of disliked. (This trick is continually reinforced in movies, where all the bad guys are unlikable, and all the good guys likable, which as anyone who has ever read Socrates knows, is almost always the complete opposite of the truth.)

Now that you have achieved the summit of political power, it is also essential that you project calm, confidence, serenity, and all the other characteristics that are completely inappropriate to the imminent disasters awaiting the tax cattle.

The way that you do this is very easy - know that you will now be taken care of for the rest of your life, and your children will never have to work, and their children will never have to work, and you will never face any significant legal problems or disciplinary action or face arrest for anything you have done, even if it means starting unjust wars, murdering people by the hundreds of thousands, imprisoning non-criminals by the millions, running up trillions in debt, authorizing torture, you name it, it's OK.

Consequences are for sheep, not farmers. A citizen cannot be caught speeding without consequences - but you are above all that now, no matter what hells you unleash on the world.

People want political power because they want something for nothing, and they want to escape the consequences of their evil actions - we want to assure you that you have now fully achieved these goals. You will never have to worry about losing your house, your job, your money, your freedom - and with this kind of immunity from political, legal and economic reality, you can project all the serene confidence of a sea captain being helicoptered to safety while his ship slowly sinks.

We can also guarantee you that you will never face any tough questions from the media. Anyone who gets to interview you will be so thrilled at the opportunity, and so excited to be advancing his career, that he will only lob you softball setups. It's true that a single question might be asked, such as, "do you think that X was a mistake?" but we can assure you with perfect equanimity that whatever you answer will be accepted, and no follow-up questions will be asked. You will always have the final say, and if anyone does dare to ask you a follow-up question, all you have to do is act mildly irritated, and insist that you have already answered that question.

If anyone persists, not to worry, his career will be over, because about 10,000 empty-headed pundits will take to the airwaves claiming to be shocked and appalled at the way that you were browbeaten and harangued, and demanding to know what your problem is, and who you think you are, and so on.

We know, we know - it sounds impossible, but it's a guaranteed fix, every single time. It's as predictable as hungry dogs chasing a dead rabbit on a string.

Ethics

There are two kinds of ethics that you need to be aware of - it is very likely that you are already aware of them, since you are where you are, but it's worth going over them one more time.

When slaves evaluate masters, relativism and deference and working together and respecting differences of opinion are key.

When masters evaluate other masters, bipartisanship and putting aside differences and working together and respecting differences of opinion are also key.

This falls into the old category of "turn the other cheek."

When masters evaluate slaves, however, it's total "eye for an eye" time!

For instance, if you propose health care legislation that will force people to do stuff, it's very important that you respect the other parties' right to disagree with your proposal. However, once it becomes law, no mere citizen is ever allowed to act on his or her disagreement with you!

Debates are for the masters, enforcement is for the slaves.

You are allowed to debate whether or not to go to war, citizens are not allowed to choose whether or not they fund the war, or are drafted to get killed in it. You are allowed to debate whether to subsidize some group, citizens are never allowed to choose whether they subsidize that group.

Free will is for the masters - slaves get the determinism of their masters' whims.

In case you have any concern that someone will point out the ridiculousness of all this, do not fear! The moment that anyone argues that we don't need violent masters - that such masters are in fact hellishly destructive - all the slaves in the world will gang up on such an exposed truth-teller, saying, in effect, "We are not slaves if you don't point out our masters!"

This reaction is all based on propaganda that is carefully layered in throughout government education - and all education is government education, because we regulate and control private schools and universities as well.

The propaganda is, like all propaganda, completely insane, but through calm repetition and attacking dissenters, it quickly gets accepted as an obvious truth.

The propaganda is this:

1. The government provides service X.

2. If the government does not provide service X, service X will never be provided.

3. Therefore, anyone arguing against the government providing service X is arguing against the necessity or value of service X.

It seems almost embarrassing to point out the foolishness of these arguments, but in the highly unlikely event you ever get a question on this, it's good to have an "answer."

According to the democratic model, governments only do what the majority of citizens want them to do. "The will of the majority," is one of our central gods, which cannot speak for itself, of course, and therefore kindly allows us to, um, speak for it.

Democratic governments only help the poor, then, because the majority of citizens want them to. If governments reflect the will of the people, then whatever governments do is entirely unnecessary, because the majority want to do it anyway.

The more that people get attacked for not caring about the poor, the less the government needs to do anything about the poor, because the attacks reflect a general preference to help the poor. The only practical argument for the continuance of a government program would be if everybody had a strong desire to get rid of it, because then, it could be argued, they did not care about its recipients. If someone said, "Let's get rid of the welfare state," and everyone cheered and joined in, we might very well have some concern about the fate of the poor - the fact that everyone defends the welfare state means that the poor will be perfectly well taken care of in a free society.

Ah, the weariness of these ridiculous arguments! We do sometimes wish that people would become just a little bit smarter, so we could all eventually become free, but we are as trapped by the livestock's illusions as they are.

Exploitation

There are two classes of parasites on the productive classes - the poor and the political. In the old days, Marxists used to blather on about the exploitation of the poor by capitalists, which was utter nonsense. When the capitalists were "exploiting" the workers in the mid 19^th century, their real wages doubled - we democratic masters have had our real claws on them for the past 40 years, and real wages have not only stagnated and fallen, but educational standards have collapsed, incarceration rates have skyrocketed, living conditions have deteriorated - and the remaining social services we provide (bribes) are all going to collapse because we have sold everyone off piecemeal under the guise of "national debt" (because the real term - serfdom - is just too accurate to be accepted).

The old-style capitalists "exploited" the poor by paying them ever-higher wages - we exploit them by selling both them and their kids off to whoever will shove a thin dime in our direction - dropping a penny in the hollow plates of the poor, keeping eight cents for ourselves, and using the last penny as collateral to borrow ten more.

But the merchant class is very useful to us, in more ways than as tax cattle, tax collectors, and productive livestock - they also shield us from popular anger at the inevitable results of our predations. When we pay ourselves with the monopoly money (literally) of their futures, prices go up. Who does the public get angry at? Us? Ha ha, get real, we don't teach them a damn thing about real economics - no, they get angry at the checkout girl at the local convenience store for high prices - and of course we always promise to "investigate" the source of such shocking inflation. It's pretty easy to pretend to investigate a mirror.

The strange thing as well is that we educate their kids, and then they expect these lost souls to be somehow objective about us! Imagine if a kid went to a school run by a government Post Office - would you expect him to learn any form of critical thinking about the Post Office? Of course not - he would get endless lessons on how wonderful, benevolent and friendly Post Office workers were, and how before the Post Office became a government monopoly, private mail carriers stole checks from starving widows, abused their workers and overcharged their helpless customers. You wouldn't expect even a sliver of truth to fall through the cracks of propaganda, but all this - and more, since the Post Office can't start wars - is inflicted on the helpless kids held prisoner in state "schools." So people arrive at adulthood worshipping the State that stole from their parents, crushed their minds under forced indoctrination, sold them into serfdom for the rest of their lives, and programmed them for endless obedience.

Imagine if we said that Goldman Sachs should run all the government schools - just picture the howls of indignation that would arise, shrill shrieks of the dangers of bias, indoctrination and programming! Ah, but give the children to the State, and everyone smiles benignly, certain that objectivity, reason and a well-tempered love of children and learning will reign supreme.

Ahhh, it does turn the stomach so at times! Everyone knows that teachers don't give even half a rat's ass about the kids - and the test is so pitifully easy that everyone knows what it is. Just remind the teachers that kids don't benefit from having over two months off in the summer - and it's hell for parents as well of course - and cite the statistics about how well kids do when they're in school year round, and don't forget everything over the summer. How will the teachers react? Meh, to ask the question is to answer it.

Childhood <> Personhood

The key to tyranny is to treat kids as somewhere between pets and hobos. If a child never thinks of himself as a full person, he will never aspire to be more than a "citizen" - i.e. to be owned, and sold, and ordered around. (People take pride in being ‘citizens,' which is completely mad, since ‘citizenship' means that they have been granted the ‘right' to work, travel and live, which are all supposed to be ‘inalienable' anyway...)

For example - imagine, as Murray Rothbard once wrote, that the government should take over magazines and books, and limit readership by local geography, and hire, fire and control all writers, editors and reporters, and force people to pay for them even if they never read them - what an unholy outcry would arise! Cries of ‘censorship' and ‘tyranny' would echo in tinny indignation from bosom to heaving bosom! Ah, but inflict far worse controls on children - force them into local schools, control all the teachers and curriculum (even for ‘private' schools) and not only are the voices of protest silent, but are only raised against anyone who dares to suggest that the free minds of helpless children are far more important than the recreational reading tastes of adults...

You'll get a kick out of this one too - ok - use government power to force everyone to pay for the indoctrination of children, force the kids to sit in dusty, still rows, barely allowed to blink - and then drug the living crap out of them if they get bored and restless - and keep them trapped there, year after year - and then tell them that their masters won the war that set them free, against National Socialism and communism! Can you imagine telling children in an entirely communist environment - public schools - that communism is the enemy? Of course, they'll just write it down and regurgitate it whenever you want, because they're terrified of being drugged - and then you have to tell them, of course, that communist dictatorships used the lie called "mental illness" to drug anyone who didn't fit in and obey the rulers!

Freedom is for the adults - communism is for the children.

Science

We have a complicated relationship with science - we need it, for weapons and tax livestock management (imagine how hard it would be to collect taxes without computers) - so we need science to flourish, but we also need to control it. The way we do this is to continually program the population to view science as a productive but dangerous force that will destroy the world if not tightly controlled. This is utterly absurd, of course, since it was our control of science through the Manhattan Project that created weapons that actually could destroy the world, but then we just tell the sheeple that, yanno, worse things would have happened if we didn't make nukes, and they all baa and agree and eat the leftover grass we shovel into their troughs.

So we do this sort of "Sorcerer's Apprentice" thing, where science is great to begin with, but then grows and grows and gets out of control and needs to be shut down in an extremity of CGI adventure. Naturally, we're really talking about ourselves, the government itself, but no one wants to think about that, so they imagine that it's all about robots and computers and carbon footprints and machines that make hot dogs in the sky...

People will always choose a thousand fairy tales over one basic fact.

Except us, perhaps. Our understanding of - and immunity to - sentimentality is our greatest power. We are the lions who hunt with sentimental pictures of little kittens.

From Here...

At this point, it does pain me to tell you that you will soon have the rather unenviable task of informing the livestock that they are pretty much screwed.

There is no way in god's green earth that our system will last even another few years, which means that you will have dust off and start playing the good old ‘sacrifice violin.'

Now this traditional instrument may sound screechy and ridiculous to your ears but trust us, just keep playing and everyone will dance in a line for you.

Just tell them that biiiig hardships are coming, that we as a nation are being ‘tested,' and that we all need to ‘pull together' and shoulder our common burdens, and look out for the most vulnerable among us, and that to achieve a new dawn, sacrifices need to be made, and hint strongly that bad forces outside your control - or before your time - have robbed the people, and will be held accountable, but that we all need to look to the future, and remember that we as a people can do anything we set our minds and wills to, and we defeated the prior tyrannies etc etc etc.

For some reason, people always take a dark masochistic delight in struggling through trying times where they all have to "pull together" and "make sacrifices" and strive to achieve the best in tragic times and so on. Probably boredom and self-contempt for their own hypocrisy, but who knows, and who cares? The important thing is that government schools and all the endless lies about past wars and depressions - that the best in people comes out in the worst of times and so on - have all programmed citizens to react with dark and lascivious glee when we demand that they spend a generation eating shit for our mistakes.

Of course, people love to punish themselves for their own hypocrisies and various other sins, and Lord knows the average state-sucking slut voter has more than enough to feel guilty about, trying to wheedle something for nothing out of the government, the future, their own children for heaven's sake! So when sacrifice is called for, most people feel secretly relieved, since all these trials, tribulations and common burdens effectively squelch any substantial social, economic or political criticisms.

"Pull together" unleashes the most savage social censorship imaginable. During the coming time of crisis, if the young people justly point fingers at the greed and hypocrisy of their elders, they will be sternly told that we all have to pull together, and there's no point playing the "blame game" now. If the young point out that they were never allowed such a mealy-mouthed avoidance strategy when they were growing up, they will be told that they are quibbling and refusing to let go of the past and so on. Ha ha, imagine a teenager trying those strategies about failing to take out the garbage, and you will instantly see how much these cowardly redirects stink!

So - self-flagellation for past crimes and avoidance of just accusations from past victims - these motives will trigger such hellish attacks on freethinkers that only the truly crazed will continue to raise these issues... (If you want to know more about this phenomenon, just remember how few Europeans criticized the ruling classes for two World Wars in two generations, but rather took pride in ‘winning' a bloodbath that cost over 50 million lives - and contrast that with how they treat a waiter who forgets their food order.)

So the plan is always the same - we pillage, plunder and bribe - then demand sacrifices from our victims. To get the general idea, picture a rapist demanding a drive home from his victim.

Anyone who does not play along with this insanity will just be branded a malcontent, not a "team player" - and mocked and ostracized. Fortunately, we have bred our livestock to be so dependent on social approval that most everyone will find this unbearable, and slink back into the single file line to the graveyard, pushing their bewildered and resentful children ahead of them...

Conclusion

So remember - you're going to be taken care of, that's the first thing to really understand. You can't go broke, you can't go hungry, you can't lose your house, you can't really be fired, and people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to hear you speak every day for the rest of your life. You will get libraries named after you, receive multimillion dollar book deals, and a guaranteed gold-plated pension with free health care for the rest of your life.

You have absolutely nothing to worry about. You have the softest seat on the biggest lifeboat.

This is, to a large degree, the source of your weird confidence, which separates you from the herd, and which they imagine is why you are their leader.

The reality is that they have endless worries that you don't have, and so you can just join us, floating above the petty fears of the masses, serene and secure like the ancient gods we have always been.

So go out among the crowds and make pretty noises with your velvet throat. Distract these fools with your eloquence while we finish pillaging their pockets. Empty out the remainder of your soul driving the sheeple off a cliff - it may haunt the remnants of your integrity, but don't worry: we do still have that stamp just waiting for your smiling face.

By Stefan Molyneux, MA

Host, Freedomain

Introduction

While strolling through the sunny woods one day, you spy a man slithering through the undergrowth, heavily camouflaged and gripping a bow and arrow.

“What are you hunting?” you ask.

“Dragons!” hisses the man proudly.

You frown. “Dragons? But dragons don’t exist!”

The man nods emphatically. “I completely agree with you! There ain’t no such thing as dragons. And I’m a-gonna shoot me one!” He raises his bow and arrow, narrows his eyes and glares through the trees, hungry to target the non-existent.

At this point, you would surely take a series of slow and steady steps backwards, aiming to put some safer distance between you and a deranged man wielding a bow and arrow.

This is one of the many, many challenges of atheism.

“Atheism” is a terrible word on many levels.

The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, defines atheism as:

“Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a god.”

To any modern, rational thinker, this is an entirely unsatisfactory definition – which is exactly what you expect from a word originally defined by theists.

First of all, the OED definition implies that there is something personal in the rational rejection of a god. “Denial” is a word associated with defensive rejections of reality, such as Holocaust denier, climate change denier – or the generic avoidance of unpalatable emotional truths: “He’s in denial about her drinking.”

Compare the above definition to this one:

“Atheism: The acceptance of the non-existence of imaginary entities such as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Bronze Age sky ghosts.”

The difference should be clear.

Also, why is the phrase “a god” used? If I say that supernatural beings such as leprechauns do not exist, why would anyone imagine that I only disbelieved in a single leprechaun named “Bob”?

Rational thinkers have nothing against any particular deity – any more than a mathematician dislikes in particular the proposition that two and two make five. If such a mathematician existed, and loudly proclaimed his opposition to that particular equation, and founded a society called “against two and two making five,” he would be considered beyond eccentric, and it would be generally understood that he had utterly failed to grasp the most basic principles of mathematics.

A thinker cannot logically differentiate the nonexistence of a deity from the nonexistence of any other thing which does not exist. Principles by definition apply in general, rather than in particular, just as a method of long division cannot only apply to one particular combination of numbers.

The criteria for existence versus nonexistence is a general standard, which applies equally to rocks, electricity, electrons, ghosts, dreams, square circles, concepts and unicorns. It cannot rationally focus its energies on only one entity – or even one category – otherwise it becomes mere prejudice, rather than the dispassionate application of a general principle.

Defining “atheism” as being “against the gods” is thus a misnomer, since it takes a merely accidental subset of a larger set of principles and turns it into an arbitrary principle itself. There is no such thing as being “against the existence of gods,” any more than there is such a thing as being “anti-leprechaun.” In fact, to say that you are against one leprechaun in particular is to imply that you believe in leprechauns overall, but find one of them in particular somehow offensive.

We cannot rationally be “against gods,” just as we cannot be “against” square circles, or hostile to the idea of gravity in the absence of mass, or offended by the idea that human beings can live unaided on the surface of the sun. These propositions are simply false, according to reason and evidence, and to create a second category of particular offense “against the gods” is irrational – and, fittingly enough, offensive, due to the implied prejudice.

Rational thinkers accept standards of existence that at least involve logical consistency – and with any luck, empirical evidence. It is the first standard that beliefs in gods fail and – as a result, there is little point looking for the second.

The word “atheist” also indicates that belief in gods is the standard, and atheism is the exception – just as “sane” is the standard, and “insane” is the exception. This is a mere scrap of sophistic propaganda, since all theists are almost complete atheists, in that they do not believe in the vast majority of man’s gods. The rejection of gods is the default position; the acceptance of a deity remains extremely rare, though not as rare as atheists would like.

The Existence of Gods

Two main errors are generally made when examining the existence of gods.

The first is to ignore the basic fact that gods cannot logically exist, and the second is to accept such logical impossibilities, but to create some imaginary realm where gods may exist. Broadly speaking, the first error is made by theists, who argue that gods do exist, and the second by agnostics, who argue that they may exist.

In the first instance, gods are viewed as similar to unicorns. If we define a unicorn as a horse with a horn on its head, we cannot logically say that such a creature can never exist. There may be such a being on some other planet, or in some undiscovered place in this world, or perhaps a mutation may arise at some point in the future which pushes a horn out of the forehead of a standard-issue horse.

The concept of a horse with a horn on its head is not logically self-contradictory – and thus such a being may exist, and it would be foolish to state otherwise.

In the same way, life forms based on silicon rather than carbon may exist somewhere in the universe – such beings are not logically self-contradictory, and so their existence cannot be rationally eliminated.

However, if I define a unicorn as a horse with a horn on its head that can fly through interstellar space, go backwards through time powered by its magical rainbow tail, and which existed prior to the universe – well, then we have moved into another category of assertion entirely.

A horse cannot live in space, since there is no oxygen, or air pressure, or water – and about a thousand other reasons. The properties and necessities of carbon-based life forms completely eliminate such a possibility.

A being which does not contradict the properties of existence may exist – a proposed being which does, may not.

Bertrand Russell argued for agnosticism by saying that there may be a little teapot orbiting somewhere in the solar system, but he considered it highly unlikely. This argument – with all due respect to Dr. Russell's genius – is incorrect. A teapot is not a self-contradictory entity. If I could communicate with Dr. Russell in his current state of nonexistence, I would ask him whether he would consider it possible that an eternal living horse was floating somewhere in deep space – and I respect his knowledge of biology enough to be sure that he would answer in the negative.

Gods are not like little teapots, or horses with horns, or very small Irishman with pots of gold – gods are entirely self-contradictory entities, the supernatural equivalent of square circles.

We do not have to hunt the entire universe to know that a square circle cannot exist, because it is a self-contradictory concept. We do not have to examine every rock on every planet to know that a rock cannot fall up and down at the same time. We do not have to count every object in the universe to know that two and two make four, not five. There is no possibility that self-contradictory entities can exist anywhere in the universe. We know that an object cannot be a teacup and an armchair and a horse with a horn at the same time. The Aristotelian laws of identity and non-contradiction deny us the luxury of believing that self-contradictory entities exist anywhere except in our own unreliable imaginations.

Why Are Gods Self-Contradictory?

At the very minimum, a god is defined as an eternal being which exists independent of material form and detectable energy, and which usually possesses the rather enviable attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

First of all, we know from biology that even if an eternal being could exist, it would be the simplest being conceivable. An eternal being could never have evolved, since it does not die and reproduce, and therefore biological evolution could never have layered levels of increasing complexity over its initial simplicity. We all understand that the human eye did not pop into existence without any prior development; and the human eye is infinitely less complex than an omniscient and omnipotent god. Since gods are portrayed as the most complex beings imaginable, they may well be many things, but eternal cannot be one of them.

Secondly, we also know that consciousness is an effect of matter – specifically biological matter, in the form of a brain. Believing that consciousness can exist in the absence of matter is like believing that gravity can be present in the absence of mass, or that light can exist in the absence of a light source, or that electricity can exist in the absence of energy. Consciousness is an effect of matter, and thus to postulate the existence of consciousness without matter is to create an insurmountable paradox, which only proves the nonexistence of what is being proposed.

If you doubt this, try telling your friends that that no woman can bear your company – and that you have a girlfriend. Having a girlfriend is an effect of female company, just as consciousness is an effect of brain matter. Alternatively, try speaking to someone without making a sound or a movement. Speaking is an effect of movement, either in the vocal chords or somewhere else, and therefore it cannot exist in the absence of motion. (If someone insists that consciousness can exist without a brain, ask them to demonstrate the proposition without using his brain.)

Thirdly, omniscience cannot coexist with omnipotence, since if a god knows what will happen tomorrow, said god will be unable to change it without invalidating its knowledge. If this god retains the power to change what will happen tomorrow, then it cannot know with exact certainty what will happen tomorrow.

The usual response from theists – it is impossible to use the word ‘answer’ – is to place their god “outside of time,” but this is pure nonsense. When an entity is proven to be self-contradictory, creating a realm wherein self-contradictions are valid does not solve the problem. If you tell me that a square circle cannot exist, and I then create an imaginary realm called “square circles can exist,” we are not at an impasse; I have just abandoned reality, rationality and quite possibly my sanity.

Theists who try this particular con should at least be consistent, and not pay their taxes, and then, when said taxes are demanded, say to the tax collector that they have created a universe called “I paid my taxes,” and slam the door in his face. (Alternatively, if theists make a mistake on a history test, and claim that the American Revolution was in 1676, they should fight the resulting bad mark by claiming that their answer exists “outside of time.”)

The fourth objection to the existence of deities is that an object can only rationally be defined as existing when it can be detected in some manner, either directly, in the form of matter and/or energy, or indirectly, based upon its effects on the objects around it, such as a black hole.

That which can be detected is that which exists, as anyone who has tried walking through a glass door can painfully tell you. Such a door is deemed to be open – or nonexistent – when we can walk through it without detecting the glass with our soon-to-be-bloody nose. It would be epistemological madness to argue that an open door is synonymous with a closed door. If someone argues that existence is equal to nonexistence, challenge them to walk through a wall rather than an archway. (The fact that the wall might be an archway in another dimension will scarcely help their passage in this one.)

Differentiating between existence and nonexistence was something that my daughter was able to manage before she was 6 months old; we can only hope that modern philosophical thinkers are able to circle back and someday achieve her prodigious feats of knowledge.

A god – or at least any god that has been historically proposed or accepted – is that which cannot be detected by any material means, either directly or indirectly.

Ah, but what about the future? Might we find gods orbiting Betelgeuse in the 25^th century? Well, while it is true that at some point we may come across some seemingly magical being somewhere in the universe that may appear somewhat godlike to us, no one who has proposed the existence of gods in the past has ever met such a being, which we can tell because no test for existence has ever been proposed or accepted.

Since “god” means “that which is undetectable, either directly or indirectly,” then the statement “gods exist” rationally breaks down to:

“That which does not exist, exists.”

Thus not only is the concept of gods entirely self-contradictory, but even the proposition that they exist is self-contradictory.

Other Dimensions

Theists claim that gods exist, atheists accept that they do not; agnostics say that gods are unlikely, but not impossible.

How do they manage this?

Many agnostics understand that gods do not – and cannot – exist in physical reality, so they create “Dimension X,” and place the possibility of gods existing somewhere “out there.” Inevitably, when a rational thinker points out that this does not solve the problem, the agnostic replies with grating haughtiness that the rational thinker is being closed-minded, and sniffs that to claim the nonexistence of any particular entity is short-sighted and unimaginative. “Surely,” he says, “if you were to tell a medieval man that human beings would one day be able to talk instantaneously around the world, he would say that such a feat was utterly impossible – but he would be only exposing the limitations of his more primitive mind, not making any objective truth statement.”

In other words, any and all certainty is primitive superstition.

This wonderful piece of sophistry is a patently ridiculous form of ad hominem, which goes something like this:

“Just as Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian physics, and Einsteinian physics was in some ways surpassed by quantum mechanics, making absolute truth statements about all forms of future knowledge shows a deep ignorance of the flexible and progressive nature of the scientific method, and the endless potential for human thought.”

This is a very strange notion, in which the scientific method is used to pave the way not away from ghosts, demons and a generally haunted universe, but rather towards it. The science of medicine has attempted to escape the primitive foolishness of witch doctors and the superstitions of demonic possession – to say that true medicine leads us towards such primitive fantasies, rather than helping us escape them, entirely misunderstands the purpose of science, reason and medicine.

Of course it is true that Newtonian physics gave way to Einsteinian physics, and Einsteinian physics may well be surpassed by some other approach – to say so is boringly obvious. However, reason and evidence is a process, it is not any specific content. Science is a method, not a specific theory or proposition. It is only reason and evidence that reveals the superiority of more accurate and comprehensive theories. The scientific method rejects self-contradictory theories as either erroneous or inconclusive, just as mathematics rejects the results of any equation that starts with the proposition that two and two make five. Science has been man's most successful attempt to flee what Carl Sagan called “the demon haunted world” – science cannot be used to pave the way back to such primitive madness.

I suppose we can accept it as a compliment to science that agnostics and theists are using it to attempt to resurrect the primitive fantasies inherited from the infancy of our species, but the powerful electricity of modern thought cannot be used to resurrect the Frankenstein of superstitious falsehoods.

Let’s look at the “Dimension X” argument in more detail.

Concepts and Instances

A central tenet of rational thinking is to recognize that an instance is not a concept. A mathematical process such as multiplication is a concept that applies to any general arrangement of numbers; it cannot be called a concept if it only applies to one particular calculation. You need an “x” to have an equation; 16/4=4 is not an equation, but an instance, a particular application of a general process called division.

In the same way, alternate dimensions cannot be invented that only contain gods, but rather must be a general concept that encompasses everything. The true argument put forward by agnosticism is not that “Dimension X may contain gods,” but rather that “nothing true can be said about our reality, because another reality may exist where truth equals falsehood.” In other words, the agnostic position is that any positive statement must be instantly negated by the possibility of an “opposite dimension.”

This proposition falls apart at every conceivable level – and even at some that cannot be conceived!

First of all, saying that we cannot make any absolute positive claims about truth is itself an absolute positive claim about truth – i.e. that truth is impossible. If we say that certainty is impossible, then we have to instantly retract that statement, since we are making a certain statement. It very quickly becomes obvious that nothing of any merit or weight can ever be said if the truth is impossible.

In other words, when the agnostic says that we cannot make any absolute claims because the opposite might be true in another universe, the agnostic cannot put forward this claim, because the opposite might be true in another universe.

All con artists operate by affirming a general rule, and then creating an exception for themselves. A thief wants everyone to respect property rights except him; a counterfeiter wants everyone to accept the value of money except him – and a philosophical con man wants everyone to reject truth except for his own propositions.

Don't fall for it, not for a minute!

The moment an agnostic says, "Gods may exist in another dimension,” immediately identify the principle behind his statement, which is that no truth can be stated, and apply it to his own statement, thus rendering it invalid.

The Second Self-Contradiction

The moment that we say, “gods may exist in another universe,” we are instantly contradicting ourselves, because the word “gods” contains specific knowledge claims – intelligence, omnipotence, immateriality etc. – which cannot be applied to a dimension about which we know nothing! To analogize this, imagine that I tell you that I'm going to play you a video of incomprehensible static – and then I insist that I can clearly see the lyrics to “Woolly Bully” scrolling across the screen.

Only one of these claims can be true – if the video is incomprehensible static, then lyrics cannot scroll across the screen – if the lyrics are scrolling across the screen, the video cannot be incomprehensible.

In the same way, if I create Dimension X, and say that we can know nothing about its contents, I then cannot say that gods may exist there, because I am then saying that I know something about the unknowable contents of Dimension X.

I cannot say that I know nothing about a particular entity, but that I also know it is green and furry – only one of these statements can be true.

The moment that I say “gods may exist in another dimension,” I am making specific knowledge claims about the contents and processes of this other dimension – i.e. that certain entities with specific characteristics may meet the criteria of existence in another dimension of which I admit I know absolutely nothing at all.

The truth of the matter is that we can say absolutely nothing about this other dimension; even if we accept that it may exist, which is problematic enough. We cannot claim to have any knowledge about what may or may not constitute existence in this other realm, or what entities may be possible, or what laws of physics may operate, or anything of the sort. Even the existence of this other realm, let alone its contents, cannot be spoken of – all we can propose is that existence may be the same as nonexistence, and invent an imaginary place where this may be possible.

However, even this argument runs into insurmountable logical contradictions.

It would be ridiculous for me to mail you a letter arguing that mail never gets delivered. If I genuinely believe that mail never gets delivered, it would be illogical for me to write you a letter. If I do write you a letter, my argument that mail never gets delivered is instantly invalidated the moment that you receive it.

In the same way, all human communication relies on physical matter of some kind, either text on paper or on a screen, or sound waves in the ear, or touch for Braille, or some other form of physical manipulation. Silence is the absence of sound waves – or at least of a medium such as air or water to carry them. I cannot deny the existence of a medium while using that medium to carry my argument. I cannot rationally yell in your ear that sound does not exist, because I'm relying on the existence of sound to carry my argument.

In the same way, I cannot rationally put forward the argument that all language is meaningless, because I must use language to communicate my argument. If my proposition that language is meaningless is true, then using language to communicate that proposition would be ridiculous – if my argument that language has no meaning is heard and understood – to any degree – then it is automatically invalidated.

To rely on existence to communicate the possibility that existence equals nonexistence is equally foolish. The objective existence of air and air pressure and ears and life and minds is required to speak and hear the argument that existence may equal nonexistence. Furthermore, the rational and predictable properties of all that exists in order to communicate an argument are presumed to be objective, since any communication between human beings requires an acceptance of the objective properties of matter.

For example, if you tell me that gods exist, and I reply, “Yes, I agree that gods do not exist,” you will doubtless correct my erroneous feedback on your position. This is only possible if the words have at least some objective meaning, and sound waves do not magically mutate from voice to ears, and so on. For words to be formed, spoken and heard, both existence and nonexistence must be accepted, since all sound waves have peaks and valleys. Text as well must have the presence and absence of somewhat contrasting colours, otherwise only one colour is seen, which is not an argument.

All human communication thus relies on the difference between existence and nonexistence, presence and absence, and accepts as axiomatic the objective behavior of matter and energy, and at least tolerable objectivity in language.

When we understand all this, we understand that using strict and objective differences between existence and nonexistence – as well as accepting the objective behavior of matter and energy – to argue that there may be no differences between existence and nonexistence, and that matter and energy may exhibit no objective behavior, is exactly the same as sending a letter claiming that letters are never delivered.

Ah, but perhaps I have misunderstood something! Perhaps I am sending a letter telling you that letters are only sometimes not delivered, in which case my argument may be somewhat weakened, but it is not entirely self-contradictory. The agnostic, after all, does not claim that gods do exist in another universe, but rather only that they may exist.

However, this is looking at the wrong side of the agnostic argument. The agnostic is making the absolute claim that absolute claims are invalid. “You cannot say that gods do not exist, because they may exist in another dimension.” This is not a relativistic or sliding scale, but rather an absolute negation. “You cannot say,” is the equivalent of “mail is never delivered.” It is not the possibility of error that the agnostic is affirming, but rather the impossibility of absolute knowledge claims of any kind. This is an absolute statement that rejects absolutism, which of course renders it invalid.

Agnosticism is one of the rare examples of a truly cosmic fail.

Agnosticism and Principles

Let's look at another argument against agnosticism.

Perhaps you think I am overstating the case – but the agnostic argument is so pervasive, and so ridiculous, that I do not think we can drive enough stakes into its hollow heart.

The agnostic claim that no truth statement can be valid because of a possible opposite universe cannot only apply to gods, but rather must apply to every object in the universe – and every argument as well! Thus, when the agnostic says “gods may exist in another dimension,” the “opposite possibility principle” applies even to his own words, which can then be rationally reinterpreted, according to his own principles, as the exact opposite of what he is saying, i.e. “there can be no other dimensions, and gods cannot exist.” If the agnostic protests that this was not his meaning, he can be told that he cannot affirm his meaning in any way, because in this other dimension, his words may have the exact opposite meaning. It is the same principle that he is applying to the atheist, and so he cannot reasonably complain when it boomerangs back and knocks over the foolish house of cards he is pretending to build.

The moment that the agnostic asserts that it is impossible to state with certainty that gods cannot exist, due to this possible alternate dimension, then his statement is automatically invalidated as well, since in this alternate dimension, gods may not exist either, or his words may mean the opposite of what he thinks they mean in this dimension, and so on. No sane person can use this other dimension to affirm or deny any truth statement in this dimension – and so the agnostic merely takes himself out of the bounds of civilized and rational debate.

The moment an agnostic hears this argument, he will doubtless say, “But...”

However, I merely interrupt him to reply, “You cannot use the word ‘but,’ since the word ‘but’ might have the exact opposite meaning in some alternate dimension.”

I would continue this process with every word he spoke after that, until he either dropped his position, or my company, which would be a relief either way.

This is what I mean when I say that all con artists wish to create a general rule, with a magical exception for themselves – the agnostic wishes to cast universal doubt on truth statements, except all the ones that he happens to make.

Agnosticism and Consistency

Since agnosticism is fundamentally an epistemological position, it cannot be confined to the existence of gods, but rather must be fundamental to all forms of human knowledge.

However, I have yet to hear an agnostic argue that we must abolish prisons, since a criminal’s guilt can never be established with certainty, since in another dimension, he might not have committed the crime. In Western legal systems, crimes must be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but in the agnostic formulation of truth, no such standard can ever be achieved.

This kind of exceptionalism is dully inevitable when dealing with religion. It never applies anywhere else.

To take another example, it is illegal to sell bogus cures for real illnesses – however, not only is Christianity’s “cure” utterly unproven, but even the “illness” itself – sin – is completely invented. Can we imagine a priest being hauled before a court for fraud, for selling a nonsense cure to an invented disease? If not, why not?

We also have laws against hate speech, or the incitement of hatred against particular groups. However, the Bible commands believers to kill gays, atheists, sorcerers, heretics, disobedient children and witches and just about everyone else who draws breath. A comic in Canada was recently hauled before the human rights commission for making a joke about homosexuals – can we imagine the printers and distributors of the Bible being charged in such a manner? If not, why not?

Gods and Non-Existence?

Even if we accept the opposite-planet Bizarro world of the agnostic position – and even if we accept that knowledge claims can be made about an unknowable realm, the agnostic position still falls flat.

There are only two possibilities for our future relationship with Dimension X – either we will never interact with it in any way, or we will find some way to penetrate its mysteries. In the first case, Dimension X will never be discovered, in which case it is merely “nonexistence” with a silly alias, and cannot be used to reject any knowledge claims. Since it remains a mere synonym for nonexistence, it cannot be used to reject nonexistence. In this case, an agnostic cannot say, “I reject that gods cannot exist by defining nonexistence as synonymous with existence – just calling it ‘Dimension X’ for funsies.”

Ah, but perhaps someday we will find a way to send a probe into Dimension X, and record some of its properties. In this case, we will be translating Dimension X into something that exists here, in our universe, just as a spectrograph translates light into waves. In other words, Dimension X will have to show up somewhere, somehow in our universe to confirm its existence, and can no longer be used as a synonym for nonexistence.

Alternatively, if Zeus is currently doing cartwheels in Dimension X, he might trip and stick his finger through the time-space continuum and poke a hole in our moon. In this case, we would have objective and empirical evidence for this event, which would constitute proof that something rather extraordinary had occurred.

In other words, the properties and characteristics of Dimension X will have to be translated into something that exists in this universe in order to confirm its existence and record its properties. If Dimension X never has any impact on our universe, then it is completely synonymous with nonexistence, and can never be used to reject nonexistence. Using the standard of nonexistence to reject nonexistence is entirely self-contradictory, the equivalent of saying “I reject the nonexistence of X by accepting that it does not exist, but using a different word.” If a surgeon said that a dead patient still lived because he used the word “gool” to mean “dead,” we would not accept his argument as particularly rational. The agnostic claim that gods cannot be said to not exist because one can use the phrase “dimension x” as a synonym for nonexistence is equally foolish and irrational.

Gods and the Supernatural

That which is self-contradictory cannot exist. Gods are self-contradictory entities. Therefore gods cannot exist.

What if a god is invented which does not possess self-contradictory characteristics?

Ah, then it is not a god.

We can imagine that 21st century man would appear godlike to our Stone Age ancestors – however, the sane among us do not believe that we have become gods due to our advanced technology.

In the same way, we may meet among the stars fantastically advanced beings – however they will not be gods, but rather just highly evolved life forms. We may meet telepathic beings who can travel through time and have made themselves immortal, but we will never meet carbon-based lifeforms that can live on the surface of the sun, or Oompa-Loompas who live in a square circle, are composed of both fire and ice, and can go North and South at the same time.

Thus it is axiomatic that gods cannot exist – if they are gods, then they cannot exist; if they exist, then they are not gods.

Accidental Knowledge?

Imagine that archaeologists come across some squiggly prehistoric cave painting that, when viewed at a certain angle, has vague similarities to the equation “E=mc²”.

Would this overthrow our entire sense of causality and the evolution of knowledge? Would we imagine that a primitive caveman largely incapable of language or mathematics had somehow discovered one of the most complex and challenging equations of modern physics?

Of course not.

We would smile at the strange coincidence, but would no more imagine a Stone Age genius physicist then we would grant a doctorate to the wind, should it happen to blow a series of sand dunes into a similar equation.

In other words, the effects of knowledge cannot exist prior to that knowledge. I could probably teach my infant daughter to scratch out “E=mc²,” but I would not imagine that she understood any of its reasoning, evidence or contents. A sick animal might break into a pharmacy and eat the pills that coincidently happened to treat its illness, but we would not call such an animal a pharmacist or a doctor.

Almost all of our conceptions of deities have come down to us from the past – and generally the pre-scientific past. When we consider the 10,000 or so gods that human beings have believed in at one time or another, we clearly understand that the development and depiction of these gods was not based on any scientific or rational understanding of the universe. Even if the impossible actually occurred, and some being were found somewhere in the universe that closely matched the description of some ancient deity, this would not be proof that such a god existed in the past, and was the source of that knowledge. Either this would be mere coincidence, or we would have to accept the reality that such a being visited our ancestors, who recorded his actual presence, which is not proof of the existence of a god, but rather a tourist.

Any historical knowledge claim about deities existed prior to any empirical evidence or proof, and thus remains in the realm of pure fantasy. Even if evidence were to accumulate at some point in the future, this does not grant prescience to the accidental imaginings of past ages. In other words, the hope that some theists and agnostics have that proofs for gods will be found in the future does not validate any existing claims about the natures and properties of deities. All prior and existing claims of knowledge about gods are false, regardless of what shows up in the future, in this or any other dimension.

Deities Before Time?

Some theists – and even agnostics – use the same “Dimension X” argument examined above, but place the alternate universe in a time before our own, rather than parallel to it in some manner.

This does not fundamentally change any of the arguments – either this universe before our own will never have any impact on us, in which case it is just another word for nonexistence, or it will, in which case it will be empirically measurable within our own universe, and subject to all the same laws of physics as everything else we examine. In other words, once it enters into our universe, it cannot contain self-contradictory properties, and therefore cannot be a god.

Quantum Physics

Quantum physics is the latest in a long line of scientific bags that people like to dump their crazy, pseudo-scientific ideas in to. The admitted strangeness and apparent self-contradictory behavior of subatomic particles is sometimes enlisted as yet another “alternate realm” wherein gods might exist.

The frank reality of quantum effects is that they have no impact whatsoever upon sense perception, since any and all quantum effects cancel each other out long before the aggregation of particles is perceptible by our unaided senses. This is why an electron may seem to be in two places at the same time, but a table never is.

Clearly, life cannot exist at a subatomic level, which is why we never think of a proton as alive, even if it is contained within a living being. Since a deity must be alive – at least in some sense of the word – it cannot exist at the subatomic level, since even the simplest form of life is a highly complex aggregation of cells and energy.

Furthermore, since the individual subatomic particles examined by quantum physics can never have any effect on objects perceivable by our senses, this invalidates all historical – i.e. prior to quantum physics – conceptions of deities. Finding ex post facto homes for gods in quantum physics, when all concepts of deities evolved prior to any knowledge of quantum physics – is a ridiculous and desperate attempt to rescue the irrational through an appeal to the scientific.

Harm to Children?

It has long been accepted by rational thinkers that religion occupies a magically aggressive place in the pantheon of human thought, remaining strangely impervious to the rational standards that have long since felled other superstitions.

As Richard Dawkins has pointed out, every religious person is virtually a complete atheist, in that he rejects the existence of every other God but the one he worships.

To understand this more clearly, imagine a mathematics tutor named Bob who refused to teach any strict methodology for solving problems.

If you were to hire Bob, and your child were to correctly answer the problem of 3x3, Bob would have to reply that it was impossible to say that three times three make nine, because in an alternate universe they might make the opposite of nine. Bob would further instruct your child not to answer any question with any certainty, and always to include this caveat with regards to any and all forms of knowledge. Bob would also say that none of his instructions – even that one – can be accepted as true, because they might be false in another universe.

Thus, when responding to a roll call at school, your son cannot say that he is present, because in another universe, he might be absent. Furthermore, he cannot actually go to school, because in another universe, the school might be located in the opposite direction from his house. He cannot go to bed, because in another universe, it might be an alligator. He cannot eat vegetables, because in another universe, they might be poison – and so on…

Surely we would view such a tutor as a sworn enemy to the mental health of our child, and would be horrified at the inevitable results of his bizarre philosophy, and would have to spend a good deal of time unravelling the Gordian knot of impossible contradictions he had tied our child’s mind into.

Principles which claim universality, but which cannot conceivably be universalized, are self-contradictory and false by definition.

Agnosticism and Religion

While agnosticism generally refrains from attacking specific positive claims about the nature of deities (other than to say that they may exist in another dimension defined as synonymous with nonexistence), religions are entirely founded on making positive and universal claims about the nature, intentions, personalities, morals and properties of deities.

An agnostic will say that an invisible man might live in the boarded-up house next door; a priest will tell you everything that the invisible man thinks and wants and is capable of.

Agnosticism and religion both require the substitution of socially-acceptable synonyms for falsehood in order to affirm their invalid positions.

Agnostics substitute “other dimensions” for “nonexistence,” while theists substitute “faith” for “falsehood.”

Why is faith false?

Well, as the Latin phrase has it – Credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it is absurd”). A square circle is an impossible entity, and therefore cannot exist. We do not have to hunt the entire universe from edge to edge to know that a square circle does not exist; it is not an act of will to accept that a square circle does not exist, it is simply a recognition of reality and the nature of existence.

A square circle is an absurd concept – or rather, to be more accurate, it is an anti-concept, in that it takes two valid but incompatible concepts and crashes them together to create a crazy mishmash of impossibility.

Take any property or ethic of the Christian God – to just pick on one absurd anti-concept – and the contradictory nature is clear.

-        “That which exists must have been created, but God, who exists, was never created.”

-        “God is all-knowing and all-powerful, which are both impossible.”

-        “God punishes a man for actions which are predetermined.”

-        “God punishes rebellious angels, although their rebellion was completely predetermined.”

-        “God claims to be morally perfect, although God fails the test of most of his 10 Commandments.”

-        Etc.

For any religion that involves prayer or supplication to be valid, the following steps must all be rationally validated and empirically proven:

1.     A deity must exist (call him “Jeb”).

2.     Jeb must have the interest and power to interfere in the universe.

3.     Jeb must have the interest and willingness to interfere in human affairs.

4.     Jeb must listen to prayers, rather than just read minds.

5.     Jeb must only listen to prayers from the members of a particular sect.

6.     Jeb must monitor and record good and bad behavior.

7.     Ideally, Jeb must punish the members of alternate sects, or those who pray in an incorrect or inconsistent fashion.

8.     Jeb must also not reward those who do not give money to his priests – and ideally, punish said folks.

As we can see, since even the existence of a deity is conceptually ridiculous, not even the first domino in this increasingly absurd row falls down.

In other words, the propositions of religion do not “require faith,” but rather are simply false – and as a result, since they command obedience and money, they are exploitative, abusive and destructive.

Religion as Child Abuse?

In his recent book “God Is Not Great,” Christopher Hitchens asked whether religion was child abuse, but in my view did not provide a very satisfactory answer. The question can be easily resolved through the philosophical approach of universalization.

It is generally accepted in society that children are mentally deficient – and in some ways, of course, they are, in language acquisition and the processing of consequences to actions and so on.

It is generally considered acceptable in a religious society to teach children that God will reward them for obedience to their elders, and punish them for disobedience.

However, we cannot put only children into the category of “mentally deficient,” since there are those with impaired mental faculties either due to a physical brain problem or injury, or due to age- or illness-related deterioration.

Let us take the example of mentally challenged individuals with Down’s syndrome.

Imagine that a home for such individuals existed, run by a man named Bob. Every morning, Bob reminds his bewildered and mentally challenged wards that the air is full of invisible demons who will attack their brains, eyes, teeth and tongues if they ever disobey one of Bob’s Commandments. Even if they are slow to obey, these demons will attack them in their dreams, and suck out their life essence, and spit it into a lake of fire, where it will burn for eternity. Every morning, they must get on their knees and plead for Bob's good opinion, otherwise he might butcher all of them by drowning them in toilets, as he did once before when he was offended…

We could go on and on, but I think that we all understand that this would be verbal and emotional abuse of the very worst and most destructive kind. The traumatized mentally challenged victims of such a nightmare environment would not be able to differentiate Bob's terrifying tales from actual reality, and would live in abject terror, and we would consider it a staggeringly evil abuse of power for Bob to verbally attack and mentally infect his victims in such a manner.

It's hard to imagine that we would judge the situation any differently if Bob ran a home for elderly adults with dementia, and terrified old ladies in the same manner. In either case, we would view Bob as a deranged sadist, lacking any shred of human compassion for his victims, and our hearts would go out to the suffering that he was inflicting through the vengeful power of his demonic language.

(As a minor tangent, this argument is exactly the same for spanking – would we accept it as morally valid to spank the elderly for their forgetfulness?)

Is religion child abuse?

Yes, if it is false. As it is.

Mentally challenged individuals with Down's Syndrome – as well as most elderly people – are nowhere near as vulnerable as children, since most of them have adults taking a significant interest in their long-term well-being.

However, when parents inflict demonic and terrifying tales of religious superstition on the tender, trusting and dependent minds of their children, who will intervene to save them?

Sadly, only real philosophers, for the rest of the intellectual classes are too busy inventing hiding places for the gods to intervene and save the children.

Power or Virtue? A Love Story

Almost all deities are objects of worship, but it is hard to know with any certainty exactly what is being worshiped. Certainly gods are very powerful – infinitely powerful, in most formulations – but I have never met a religious person who worships only the power of his God. No, it is always the virtue of God that is worshiped; the power is merely incidental.

However, the virtue of a deity is problematic on many levels.

If human beings only ever wanted to eat the food that was best for them, we would have no need for the science of nutrition. Our desire for fats and sugars drives the need for nutritional information and discipline, just as our desire for energy conservation drives the need for information about exercise. If we could all automatically do any mathematical calculation in our heads, we would not need to be taught mathematics, and so on.

All human disciplines thus arise to counter desires which run against our best long-term interests. The balancing of long and short-term interests is the very essence of wisdom – the short-term hit of a cigarette versus the long-term risk of lung cancer, the short-term emotional relief of verbal abuse versus the long-term harm to our relationships, to name just two examples.

The discipline of ethics is no different.

The need for virtue in humanity arises out of mortality, and weakness, and temptation, and relative powerlessness – none of which concerns God in any way. Would God need to be courageous, if He was all-powerful? It’s hard to see how. Would He need to remind himself to be honest, if He could suffer no negative consequences for his honesty? Would He find it challenging to resist the temptations of peer pressure? He is peerless, of course!

In many video games, there is a secret “god mode,” which allows players to stroll through the game without taking any damage from enemies, usually with infinite ammunition and pixel-shredding weapons. I can't imagine thinking that a player was really good if he completed a game in “God mode” – in fact, I can't imagine why he would bother. In the same vein, if Mike Tyson in his prime were to jump into a boxing ring with a five-year-old girl, and beat her senseless, it would be hard to admire his athletic prowess.

Can we admire the virtue of a being who has no need for virtue? That would be like admiring someone for not smoking, though he had never been exposed to cigarettes, or praising the sensible fish-based diet followed by a man marooned on a desert island.

Worshiping a God for His virtue is like admiring a man in a coma for refraining from alcoholism.

God and Virtue?

Even if we put all of this aside, the question still remains: how do we know that God is virtuous?

If we are at all interested in efficiency – and as mortal beings it must have some interest to us – the first place we look for virtue is consistency with stated principles. This does not automatically prove virtue, since those stated principles might be immoral – but it does mean that we can at least check for hypocrisy before venturing further.

Thus integrity is a necessary – but not sufficient – criterion for virtue.

If we want to lose weight, and go to a bookstore, and see 50 diet books on the shelf, how likely are we to choose the diet book written by a fat author? Would such a book not more properly belong in the comedy section? “Ah,” you may say, “but the fact that an author is fat does not automatically invalidate his diet.” That is certainly true, but so what? Life is short, decisions are endless, and we cannot investigate every conceivable claim. It is enough to know that a fat dietitian either is following his own diet, in which case it will be unlikely to help us lose weight, or he is promoting a diet that he himself does not follow, which calls his judgment into question, to say the least. Either way, we move on.

The same principle applies to ethics.

If a man constantly preaches the virtue of helping others in need, and then steps over a man bleeding to death in a gutter, we cannot reasonably praise his integrity. While we may agree with him that helping others in need is morally good, his actions inform us that he does not agree with his own moral arguments.

Most religions explicitly state that helping others in need is morally good – think of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament. However, since gods do not exist, and so cannot intervene, religions have the rather challenging task of explaining why their “moral” God does not help those in need. If it is immoral for travelers on the road to ignore a bleeding man, when it will cost them both time and resources to help him, is it not infinitely more immoral for God to refrain from helping, when it will cost God neither time nor resources, since He has an infinity of both?

We could go on ad nauseum with these examples, such as the genocidal habits of the Old Testament deity, contrasted with His commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but I'm sure you get the general point.

If we are wise, we do not take a man’s claim that he is virtuous at face value, but will ask first about the contents of his moral beliefs, and then about his practical consistency with those values. A man can only be considered virtuous when he has good values, and strives for and achieves reasonable consistency with those values. If he has bad values, clearly he cannot be virtuous, just as if he has good values but does not act on them.

Gods command men to fight evil, but gods allow evil in the world. Gods prohibit killing, but gods kill. Gods command their followers not to judge others, but gods judge. Gods punish the predetermined actions of people, which shows about as much maturity and wisdom as jailing a cell phone. Gods continually act in direct contradiction to their own stated moral values, which is a hallmark of great immorality.

A man raised by wolves who has no conception of ethics may be forgiven for stealing; a man who preaches respect for property is fully responsible if he steals, because he has already displayed his knowledge of ethics. We would not fault a waiter for failing to perform an emergency tracheotomy; a doctor would far more responsible, since he possesses the necessary knowledge to help.

Thus it is hard to understand exactly what is being worshiped when a God is being praised. Is it power? But power is morally neutral at best, and while it may elicit awe or deference, it cannot be morally worshiped in and of itself. Is it virtue? But we have only the God's word that He is virtuous, which is exactly what would we would expect from a hypocritical con artist bent on praising himself only to arouse admiration and obedience in us.

The whole question of virtue gets buried under the contradictory kaleidoscope of justifications for religion. Theists are faced with the impossible task of attempting to justify primitive and brutal superstitions according to modern moral and scientific sensibilities. The more intelligent among them know that this is impossible, so they create a bewildering miasma of contradictions, foggy stall tactics, bizarre combinations of moral relativism for adults (“this passage is metaphorical”) and abusive absolutism for children (“Jesus died for your sins!”).

The Costs of False Ethics

Our acceptance of these tactics – which would be laughed out of the room in any other human discipline – has come at a truly catastrophic cost to our moral development and understanding as a species.

Over the past 2,500 years, we have advanced in almost every human discipline – except ethics.

Despite our staggering advances in technology, medicine, physics, biology, engineering – and almost any other field you would care to name – our progress in moral philosophy has not changed since the days – and death – of Socrates.

We still have wars, and torture, and child abuse, and national debts, and the forced indoctrination of the young – and we cannot come to any moral standards that can be generally accepted by reasonably intelligent people the world over. We despise theft, and then accept taxes – we despise murder, and praise soldiers – we tell our children not to use force, and then we use government force to ‘educate’ them.

The original formulation of ethics was to create a set of rules, to encourage people to follow those rules – even if they did not understand them – and to punish transgressors with imprisonment and fines in the here and now, and eternal damnation in the hereafter.

The threat of secular retribution from the state, combined with the hope for internal guilt and self attack from religion, was the best that could be achieved when humanity was still convinced that the Earth was flat, trees had souls and the world rested on an infinity of giant turtles.

Nothing has changed in any fundamental way since the dawn of thought. We still encourage people to be “good” by following social standards and mostly arbitrary laws, and then violently attack them when they break the obviously arbitrary rules that have been invented.

To take a simple example, to kill a man in the street is a great moral crime; to kill a man on a battlefield is a great moral virtue. “No green costume” equals moral evil – “green costume” equals moral heroism. If one man tells you to murder, you get a jail cell – if another man tells you to murder, you get medals and a pension.

Alternatively, the initiation of force against a peaceful individual for the purpose of removing his property is clearly theft when done in a dark alley; the taxation policies of a great nation are, as the saying goes, “the price we pay to live in a civilized society.”

I cannot lock my neighbor in my basement for making too much noise, but I can call the police to lock him in jail if he grows certain vegetables in his basement, which has far less effect on me.

If I am poor, and I steal food, I go to jail – however, if I vote for politicians to forcibly transfer other people's wealth to me through the welfare state, I am an engaged citizen.

These are all paradoxes that every reasonably intelligent person has mulled over at one time or another, but they have remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, and I would argue that this is largely due to religion.

A false answer – particularly when it is highly profitable to liars – is the ultimate barrier to progress in human thought. Religion is the worst possible answer to the question of ethics, since it is not an answer at all, but merely a threat based on falsehoods.

One of the reasons that medieval economics remained so primitive and unproductive was the Guild system, which required many years of poorly paid labor to learn even the most simple and menial of tasks. Those who had already passed through the system made more money individually than they would have if the system had been suddenly abandoned, and free competition had opened up. The older and wealthier members of society thus continued to block free competition from the young, and while they may have maintained their own income in the short run, they killed economic growth in the long run, which was to their own detriment, and the detriment of their children of course.

The threat was punishment from the state, the lie was that seven years of apprenticeship were necessary to become, say, a bricklayer – and so society stagnated at near starvation levels for almost a thousand years, until the shortage of labor that arose from the Black Death began to unravel the Guild system.

In the same way, the “moral teaching” of religion is only a threat – secular punishment from the state, eternal punishment from God – based on a series of lies, i.e. that gods exist, are moral, and must be obeyed.

The institutionalization and profitable exploitation of this system has effectively barred philosophers from examining morality from a rational and secular standpoint. Either philosophers are religious (or afraid of the religious), in which case they tend to avoid attacking fundamental moral problems, for fear of arousing attack – or philosophers are statists (or afraid of the government), in which case they tend to avoid attacking fundamental moral problems, for fear of arousing attack.

Those who work for churches would view any rational system of secular ethics as a direct threat to their income and position, the same goes for those who work for the state.

Thus “right-wingers” tend to be more in favor of a smaller state, but are very religious; “left-wingers” tend to be more skeptical of religion and secular in nature, but tend to be more in favor of a larger state.

“Choose your poison” seems to be our only approach to solving moral problems.

Any society which relies on false and contradictory morality – and all societies currently fall into this category –  must substitute aggression for argument in the instruction of children. A child who asks why a soldier gets a medal for killing in a war, when he would be thrown in jail in peacetime, can receive no sane and rational answer, for none exists. Parents, priests and teachers seem to be fundamentally averse to saying that they do not know the answer to this question, or any of the other hundreds of ethical questions posed by children.

Because we do not know the answer to these questions, we must threaten children in order to throw them off the scent, so to speak. This may be overt, or more subtle, through exasperated sighs, rolling one's eyes, and rolling out the tired old bromide that the child will understand when he gets older.

False moral principles are the foundation for the greatest edifices of human society – the state, the military, the police, the church, public schools and so on. Since these enormous and powerful institutions rest on ridiculous and indefensible moral contradictions, to persist in questioning these principles is to take an axe to the base of the tree of the world. The entire profit and sense of human society sits like an enormous inverted pyramid on a few shaky and trembling – and false – ethical axioms.

Our lack of progress in solving moral problems without using aggression is entirely attributable to the confusing infections of religiosity. Just as it took a secular mind to solve the problem of biological evolution, it will take a secular mind to solve the problem of secular, rational and scientific ethics. However, any theory that defers to religion must inevitably create a central vortex of wild irrationality that it must skip around, distorting and ruining the theory as a whole.

In the same way, any theory that defers to statism, taxation and war creates exactly the same vortex, since it cannot ban the initiation of force to solve social problems, yet it must ban the initiation of force to solve personal problems, and so mealy-mouthed madness can only follow from such dismal and initial compromises. “The initiation of force through taxation is moral, but the initiation of force through theft is immoral…” “The initiation of force in war is moral, the initiation of force without war is immoral…” “Public violence is good, private violence is bad…” etc.

This is why the modern coterie of secular atheists will never be able to solve the problem of ethics, since they remain wedded to the state – to the initiation of force – as a central moral axiom within society. Thus Sam Harris says that we need to solve the problem of war by creating a world government, while Richard Dawkins remains fundamentally unable to criticize the state, since he is fundamentally an employee of the state, while Christopher Hitchens is still recovering from his totalitarian Marxist impulses, and continues to praise the obviously unjust and immoral Iraq war (though in charity we can safely assume that results more from his family military history than any objective judgement).

It seems enormously difficult to overcome our own prejudices, and the historical errors that seem almost to have been embedded into our very DNA. It may be too much to ask for true originality in solving these problems, but we should at the very least ask for an avoidance of the false answers that have so repetitively failed for the past 2,500 years.

We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.

Why Gods?

It is helpful, but not essential, for atheism to explain why the concept of gods is so widespread and prevalent among mankind. The 10,000 or so gods that lie scattered across the past and present cultures of our species must represent some form of universal content or meaning for this fantasy to be so widespread.

In general, religion has gone through four major phases – the first was animism, or the idea that every rock and leaf and tree was imbued with a spiritual force. In this approach, a farmer would profusely apologize to a rock before moving it out of the way of his plow. It is fairly easy to understand that this arose from a fundamental confusion between what is living and what is not, or what has consciousness, and what does not. A man who thinks that a rock deserves an apology lives in an extremely primitive state of mind, wherein the division between his own consciousness and inanimate matter has not yet been established. My 18 month old daughter is losing the habit of saying hello to the toilet, and her bath, and her toes, which gives you a sense of how primitive this phase is.

In the second phase of religion, the distinction between living and not living becomes established, and a multiplicity of deities that are specifically and thoroughly anthropomorphic take refuge somewhere above the clouds, or on the peak of a mountain, sucking up in their wake all of the projected consciousness that formerly resided in rocks and trees and rivers. This is a vast improvement in accuracy – not to mention sanity – in that the differentiation between conscious and unconscious becomes established in a much wider sphere.

In the third phase, the warring multiplicity of gods is in a sense hunted down, rounded up and herded into one big squirming bag of pseudo-monotheism. The former glorious ribaldry of the ancient Greek religions becomes diluted and caged into a tyrannical hierarchy of a single, inhuman and utterly abstract God. This phase contains a variety of insurmountable tensions, which inevitably fragment the new monotheism into an even more bizarre version of the older polytheism, such as the Holy Trinity and the thousands of saints.

In the fourth phase, religion becomes a set of more or less convincing fairy tales, wherein obedience to a complete text is not required, but followers can pick and choose what they like, according to their own personal preferences and tastes, and God is turned into a sort of ideological lapdog, which trails after the prejudices of the believer, imbuing his own personal bigotries with a vague glow of eternal approval.

In all these phases, there is a deep and consistent sense of a vast and powerful consciousness that lies outside the range of our conscious ego, which contains deep and mysterious elements of eternity; which existed before us, and will continue to exist after us, which informs and guides many if not most of our decisions, reveals its purposes and intentions through visions and dreams, frustrates our vices and supports our virtues, and responds indirectly and metaphorically to abasement and supplication.

It is scarcely a novel insight to point out that our minds are divided between our conscious ego and our subconscious. Our conscious ego needs little explanation; it is the self aware part of us that responds to willpower, focus, attention, and has direct access to the memories that we have accumulated in our lifetimes. It is a precise and astoundingly powerful tool that in a very real sense can be called the most mortal part of ourselves, since it grows and develops with us, and will certainly die with us, as will all of our personal memories.

However, there exists below consciousness, or surrounding consciousness, the subconscious, whose processing power dwarfs the puny efforts of our conscious mind, and which also contains an element of eternity within itself. Our conscious memories are specific to our own lives, as are our more conscious choices and plans. I may dream at night of something I experienced that day, but the capacity for the experience of dreaming is not something that I have chosen, but rather something that my subconscious mind has developed and inherited and refined over millions of years.

The subconscious mind, which controls everything from our heart rate to our breathing to the increasing uneasiness we experience when in a dangerous situation we have not yet noticed consciously, is like an eternal guardian angel – or avenging devil if we have done evil – which is constantly prodding us with interfering emotions and sensations, discouraging us with fear and guilt, spurring us on with desire and pleasure, lecturing us about our choices in nightly dreams, whipping us on with short-term lust while simultaneously cautioning us with fears about the long-term stability of our sexual partners – to name just a few.

When we think of religion, we think of a puny consciousness – that of man – embedded in an eternal, infinite and seemingly omniscient consciousness which never shows itself directly, but which takes an enormous interest in us, and evaluates our choices and preferences, and rewards us and punishes us, and responds in maddeningly oblique ways to our direct and painful supplications.

Gods are also experienced as existing before us, and living on after us, which directly relates to the quasi-eternal nature of the subconscious, which existed prior to our conscious mind and memories even in the individual, and which is the ancient foundation upon which the temple of our ego was built.

The mind of God is also considered to be vastly superior to that of man – is this not also an exact description of the subconscious, whose processing power has been estimated as 7,000 times that of the conscious mind?

Man is considered to be a creation of God, and God is a deep and eternal consciousness that has existed forever – is this not an exact description of the relationship between the conscious ego and the subconscious? As a species, and in our own lives, our ego evolves out of our subconscious, which is why we cannot remember our very early years. I have an arm which I can call my arm in a sense, but it is not really my arm, because it existed before I experienced an “I.” My arm preceded me, since it developed in the womb – and my ego had no part in its planning or creation, but rather my ego grew out of my body, many years later. My arm, my body and my subconscious existed before me, and certainly my body will exist after me, though my ego will not be around to watch it decompose.

Thus when we say that man is created by God, what we really mean is that the ego is created by the body, which precedes the ego both individually and collectively. My arm preceded my consciousness by years, and human arms in general preceded my particular arm by millions of years. It is in this sense that we are in fact created by an eternal pattern that precedes us, however primitively we may have anthropomorphized this basic truth.

The subconscious – like monotheism – also resists the imposition of a singular identity, no matter how fervently desired. The subconscious contains a vast multiplicity of alter egos, various aspects of the conscious mind designed to fit into whatever hierarchy wraps around us in the moment – as well as the multiple alter egos of those around us, those who raised us and taught us and, perhaps, harmed and abused us.

To take an obvious example, when I was a child I had a teacher who was a bully, and this teacher would immediately become servile when the principal came into the classroom – I have within my subconscious not only this teacher as an individual, but this teacher as a personality with multiple alter egos. I have my own alter egos, as well at the alter egos of thousands of other people I have met over the course of my life, which is why, since religion is merely a superstitious description of our subconscious, monotheism can never hold.

Things which do not work generally do not last, which is why few of us indulge in rain dances anymore when we really want a downpour. There is something in religion, though, which does work, despite its obvious falsehoods, and my argument is that what works is the act of asking a superior intelligence for guidance and wisdom. The simple fact is that people who pray often do experience a response, and the obvious and empirical answer is that they are asking for wisdom from their own subconscious, which responds in its usual oblique yet amazingly accurate fashion. A man who asks God for an answer is asking his subconscious for advice, and anyone who has spent any significant time on the couch of a good therapist, examining his dreams and his feelings and his impulses, sooner or later understands the power, fertility and objectivity of the subconscious – and once this is understood, the accuracy and utility of religion is revealed. The clarity and precision of the conscious mind requires no explanation, since we experience it countless times every day – the wisdom and astounding parallel processing power of the subconscious is largely only available to those who approach it on bended knee, with humility and patience and bottomless curiosity.

This is not to say, however, that religion is a form of self-knowledge, or that grandiose superstitions are somehow equivalent to humble introspection. It is certainly true that among those already predisposed to gentleness, virtue and courage, the impulses returned from the subconscious can truly aid them in achieving and maintaining these admirable virtues – but as we all know, these are not the only kinds of people in the world. I get many messages from religious people who tell me that although I am not a believer, their God loves me. While I certainly do appreciate these warm sentiments, I cannot afford to take them very seriously, because what would I say if they wrote to tell me that their God hated me for my unbelief, as the Bible says? If I accept irrational love, I cannot very well reject irrational hatred. There is an enormous difference between humbly consulting wise but hard to access aspects of myself, and believing that I am receiving divine commandments from a perfect and all-powerful intelligence outside myself.

The essence of self-knowledge is negotiation, the recognition that every aspect of the self has a valid seat at the table, and deserves to be heard, but that none shall rule. Some people think of this as a democracy of the self, but I think that is a tragically inaccurate and destructive way to look at it, because in a democracy, the government always has the final say, and enforces its will through the force of law. It is infinitely more accurate and healthy to say that what is required is a stateless state of mind, or the anarchy of the self, where all is negotiation, and no final arbiter can enforce decisions. The discomfort generated by refusing to promote an inner dictator – even temporarily – to a position of final authority can be extreme, particularly since we are raised in such horribly authoritarian structures – school, church, so often the family – yet it is necessary for us to progress as a species to a more peaceful world.

The closest current analogy to the anarchy of self is the voluntarism of free-market, without government, where wealth and authority may ebb and flow, but all is negotiation and peaceful interaction.

Religion supports the promotion of the subconscious to a position of ultimate and final authority, since it worships the subconscious as a God, which is extremely dangerous, since no aspect of the self should ever be a tyrant in the mind of a healthy man, just as no single muscle in the body should dominate all other muscles. We require a highly complex interplay of hundreds of muscles even to walk – when one muscle becomes dominant, we call that a cramp, and consider it an extremely uncomfortable situation that needs to be alleviated at once.

In more extreme cases, a man who prays to an imaginary being will hear voices in his head telling him what to do, and religion supports the idea that these voices come from a god, not a horribly damaged part of his own psyche, with all the resulting disasters that can occur from such a tragic misapprehension. It is true that the more gentle among the religious reject the theological validity of those who claim to hear voices coming from God, yet they are on a slippery slope when they take such a noble stand, since if they perceive their contemporaries to be mentally ill for hearing voices and believing in gods, what are they to make of those who wrote their holy texts? Few modern Christians would kneel before a man claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, but rather would suggest that he would benefit from the services of a mental health practitioner – would they say the same to Jesus himself? Most Christians would say that Jesus performed miracles, but there is no evidence for this of course, other than the hearsay of other people who were doubtless equally mentally ill. If I said that Christians should worship a friend of mine because he performed miracles that only I could see, would they agree? It is impossible to imagine that they would.

The religious also believe that gods watch and judge us, and this seems entirely in accordance with the subconscious reality of a conscience. A conscience is nothing terribly complex; it is simply the extrapolation of our stated principles into universals, followed by the comparison of our actions to these universals. If I hit my daughter while telling her not to hit others, this basic contradiction – or perhaps more accurately revolting hypocrisy – is instantly noted and retained by my subconscious. I will as a result distinctly feel that there is something wrong with what I am doing, which will either propel me to examine my own hypocrisy, or redouble my attacks upon my daughter for her imagined transgressions.

If I act on impulse, and then invent endless ex post facto justifications for my actions, with reference to universal principles, then I become a bewildering, dangerous and annoying hypocrite to those around me. I cannot act with any integrity, because I have erected high and thorny walls between the various aspects of myself that need to come together so that I can act with reasonable consistency.

Unfortunately, philosophy emerged from religion in much the same way that mankind evolved from fetid swamp dwellers, with the result that principles were invented to excuse evil and elevate hypocrisy to the status of virtue. For instance, the Bible commands believers to refrain from murder, but the god considered to be all virtuous kills virtually the entire world in a fit of rage. This kind of staggering hypocrisy requires a vast amount of verbal fencing and befogging to avoid. Rationalizing the irrational was the original basis of philosophy, which is why to create a philosophy based on reason and evidence is such a radical project.

Agnosticism and Cowardice

I have often argued that agnostics are cowards, and I would like to make that case here.

First of all, I do not consider the position itself to be cowardly, but rather if superior and irrefutable strong atheist arguments are consistently rejected in favor of the mental fog of agnosticism, I consider that cowardly and enormously destructive.

We cannot be reasonably criticized for not adhering to knowledge we have yet to learn. Was an 18th-century physician negligent for failing to prescribe a cure that had not yet been invented? Of course not – but we would condemn a 21st-century physician for such malpractice. I would not criticize my 18 month old daughter for deliberately pouring juice on the carpet, an act I would consider wilfully aggressive on the part of an adult guest.

Thus if you are an agnostic, but have not yet heard the arguments in this book, please do not think that I am calling you a coward – if that even means anything to you – but after you have heard these arguments, if you cannot refute them, and still cling to your irrational position, then that is certainly the label I will apply to you, since you will have earned it.

The basic tenet of agnosticism is that no positive statements about truth can be made because some contradictory evidence may exist in this or some other universe. There is so much that is wrong with this position that it is hard to know even where to start, so let's start with something quite simple, and then work up to the more complex objections.

First of all, agnosticism is always and forever specific only to the existence of deities. I have never once heard an agnostic argue that we cannot call rape wrong because it might be right in some other universe. I recently had a debate on agnosticism with a staunch antigovernment libertarian, who argued that we could not say there were no gods because gods might exist in some other universe. I then asked him how he could assert that governments were immoral, because they might be moral in some other universe? He replied that governments have specific properties, which I did not particularly understand, and I replied that gods also have specific properties, which is why we use the word “gods” rather than “spoon,” or “aglet,” or “spork,” or “tine.” He did not respond to this, but I think the point is very clear. If the possible existence of alternate universes where truth equals falsehood invalidates any positive declaration of truth, then this applies universally, and not specifically only to gods. I have never heard an agnostic argue for the potential existence of Santa Claus in some other universe, or leprechauns, or square circles, or two and two making five. I have never seen a scientist rejecting the claim that the world is round because in another universe, it might be shaped like a banana.

We can all imagine how offensive it would be for a man to argue that we cannot call rape immoral, or attempt to prevent and punish it, because it might be virtuous in some other dimension – such a man would be obviously attempting to deal with his own psychological problems by creating some nonsensical and fogging philosophical junkyard of confusion. Have you ever heard an agnostic argue that child molesting priests should not be punished, or morally criticized, because child rape might be beneficial to kids in some other universe? We would view such ghastly equivocation as the sign of a bad conscience, and quite possibly a mental illness.

Agnosticism also faces the problem of the “null comparison.” In computer languages, variables can be created called “variants,” which can contain any type of data, from pictures to videos to numbers – the memory clipboard on your computer, used for copying and pasting just about anything, is an example of this. If you ask a computer to tell you whether the number two is equivalent to a “variant,” the computer will tell you that this cannot be done, because you cannot be sure that the variant is in fact a number. If I ask you whether the number two is equal to “X,” where “X” can be anything in the universe – or nothing at all – you will tell me that this fundamentally does not compute, and might wonder what kind of bizarre game I was up to.

“Is Susie an ‘X’?” There is no way to know – if “X” equals “female” then yes. If X. equals “asteroid” then the answer is quite likely no. The question as it stands cannot be answered. This does not mean that Susie can be anything – this does not mean that Susie might be an asteroid as well as a female human being as well as a magical unicorn, a square circle and the pot of gold at the end of a leprechaun’s rainbow.

You cannot compare anything to an unknown “X” – particularly something with known properties. The concept “deity” has specific properties, and cannot rationally be compared to some unknown alternate universe, about which we know nothing at all – the ultimate “X.”

Thus the statement that gods might exist in an alternate universe is completely invalid, and entirely self-contradictory, since we are claiming to have some knowledge of existence and the specific properties of gods in some alternate universe about which we fully admit we know absolutely nothing, not even whether it exists. (Even the statement “an alternate universe may exist” is completely invalid, because existence is a property of our universe, and since we know nothing about an alternate universe, we cannot use the term “existence” to refer to anything about it.)

Closing the Open Door

Imagine that you drive over to a friend’s house to pick him up to go to a movie. You knock on the door, and he opens it.

“Let's go,” you say.

He hesitates. “I can't go through that door,” he says.

“Why not?”

He purses his lips and shakes his head. “Because it might be closed in some alternate universe...”

Would you accept this as a rational and healthy statement on the part of your friend?

Of course not. You would try to get him some professional help. You would be particularly concerned that he opened the door in the first place – thus indicating specific knowledge about its status – and only then got all foggy about whether it was opened or closed.

But this is exactly the position of agnostics! They open the door of reason and evidence in order to nullify reason and evidence. They use a rational argument to say that reason is invalid. They create evidence out of thin air which is the opposite of existence and essentially say that no conclusions can be made because existence might equal the opposite of existence.

Why is this so cowardly?

If the agnostic position is valid, and if agnostics genuinely believe that no positive conclusions can ever be achieved and maintained, then surely they have far more important things to achieve in this world, relative to their values, then haggling over possible sky ghosts in another universe.

Surely agnostics should be virulently opposed to the existing justice system, which puts a man in jail for life based on a videotape of him stabbing his wife to death. This is a far more immediate reality than whether Zeus might exist in Dimension X – yet I have never heard an agnostic say that we should never send anyone to jail, because even if this man undoubtedly murdered his wife in this dimension, he might not have murdered her in another dimension, and so we cannot say for sure that he is guilty.

I have never heard an agnostic refuse to go to a funeral, arguing that the deceased might still be alive in another universe.

I have never heard an agnostic refuse medical treatment, on the grounds that he might be perfectly healthy in Dimension X, or that what cures him here might kill him “over there.”

I have never borrowed money from an agnostic, and have him accept my argument that I do not have to pay him back in this universe, since I might have already paid him back in another universe, and so he cannot say for sure that he has not been repaid.

I have never heard an agnostic tell a victim of abuse that she has no right to be upset, because in another universe, she might not have been abused, or abuse might be the opposite of abuse.

No, agnostics never ever advocate these or a hundred million other absurd, offensive and insane positions.

Why not?

Why would agnostics only apply this kaleidoscopic and fogging “alternate universe” theory to the most distant and incomprehensible of human conceptions – that of a deity – and not to the far more egregious, immediate and important concerns of human society?

The answer is obvious – because agnosticism would be revealed as absurd, offensive and ridiculous if it were applied even remotely consistently.

So the question still remains – why is the door left open only for gods, and nothing else?

The answer is equally obvious – because agnostics are cowards.

Agnosticism and Fear

The magic fog machine of agnosticism only pumps its noxious gases into the religious realm – it’s like a cloud that miraculously wraps itself only around priestly garments. The reason, of course, for the astounding specificity of the “alternate universe” argument is that religious people tend to get upset, offended, ostracizing and angry when told that God does not exist.

This has little to do with the non-existence of God, but rather triggers all the volatile emotions surrounding family, culture and community.

When a religious person is told that there is no God, what he hears is, “My parents lied to me.”

A man who is told that there is no God no longer sees in the mirror a being with a glowing soul, but a cramped sub-species of superstitiously (and surreptitiously) indoctrinated livestock – lied to, bullied and controlled for the sake of material money in the here and now. He is revealed not as a free man, basking in the glory of the divine, but a mere slave to the lies of the priests, fed crippling falsehoods and fattened for the feast.

People do not really believe in gods, that is a basic reality of life – they say that they believe in gods because they are afraid of being attacked by others for expressing doubt, or thought. Religions are the ultimate case of the emperor's new clothes, an old fairy tale where thieving weavers pretend to make a suit for the King, claiming that anyone who is unfit to his position will be unable to see it. Naturally, everyone pretends to see the suit, and marvels at its fine colors, until a boy on the street innocently asks why the King is walking around naked.

If you walk up to a man and tell him that his parents lied to him about everything that is true and good and right in the world, and sold his hide to thieving priests because they were afraid to stand up for truth and virtue, naturally he will be very, very upset.

Clearly, this is why agnostics do their n-dimensional somersaults – to avoid the anger, offense and potential retaliation from the religious.

I have no particular issue with people who do not want to step into the boxing ring of philosophy – not everyone is suited for these kinds of conflicts, and certainly battling superstition is not a strict moral requirement. It can be extraordinarily uncomfortable to experience the disorientation, bitter anger and caustic ostracism shooting up from the deep well of discontent when you shine down the light of reason and evidence. It is not for everyone, it is not necessary, and one can live a virtuous and happy life without taking on this kind of combat.

The world is filled with countless wrongs that I do nothing to prevent or avenge – I do nothing to feed starving children in North Korea, and while I am unhappy that they are starving, I recognize that I have chosen not to help them. I think that I am doing my own part to advance the cause of truth, reason, virtue, evidence and philosophy in the world, and I am very proud of my achievements in these areas, but of course there are millions of wrongs I do nothing about, and I recognize the reality of that, and do not seek to make excuses about my choices.

Imagine that immediately after I said that I was doing nothing to help the starving children of North Korea, I immediately said, “But there is no reason to believe that they are actually starving, because in some alternate universe, they might not be hungry at all!”

Would this not be a rather bewildering statement for me to make? Why on earth would I need to create an alternate universe in which North Korean children were not starving?

Again, the answer is blatantly obvious – I need to create an alternate universe where North Korean children are not starving because I am extremely uncomfortable with not feeding them.

If I were at peace with my decision, I would not need to create an alternate universe wherein that decision would be unnecessary. It does not require a high level of psychological sophistication to understand that if I am unfaithful to my wife, and then I obsess over an alternate universe wherein I remain faithful to my wife, that my obsession is driven by guilt and shame and a tortured desire to have chosen differently in the past. It also is not the summit of psychological insight to understand that I have a need to create an alternate universe wherein I am faithful to my wife because I am fairly sure that I will be unfaithful to her again in the future, and am preparing the way for another transgression.

I do not have conclusive empirical evidence for this, but I have certainly experienced it during my many years of debating these issues, with friends and strangers alike, but my strong belief is that agnostics are secular-minded people who come from religious parents. Deep down, they fear – and I would imagine not unreasonably – that their parents will choose God over them, if faced with such a choice. This is a truly tragic situation, which I have not had to face directly myself, and my heart goes out to people caught in this supernatural trap. Agnostics and theists are caught in the endless and stagnant merry-go-round of “let's agree to disagree.” Agnosticism is a way of fencing off a topic emotionally with a big cloudy fog bank upon which is inscribed the blurry letters, “Don't go there!”

The fact that agnostics only invoke alternate universes for gods indicates not that I think that agnostics are cowardly, but rather that they themselves are of this opinion.

I wish to reiterate that I do not think that it is cowardly to avoid confrontation with the religious – I can perfectly well understand why someone who has a reasonably good relationship with religious parents might wish to avoid confrontations about the nonexistence of gods. However, honesty is the first virtue, and the most important honesty is honesty with the self – if that is absent, everything that follows is false. The true reality for agnostics is that they do not wish to anger or upset religious people – I can understand that, but that needs to be admitted. Failing that admission, agnostics need to apply their “alternate universe” theories to everything, since it is a principle of epistemology, or fundamental knowledge.

To create a singular exception to a universal rule for that which makes you uncomfortable, rather than just admitting your discomfort, is dishonest and cowardly.

If an agnostic can honestly admit that he is afraid of confronting religious people, then he does not need to continue slithering through the foggy gymnastics of alternate universes and the certain knowledge of the uncertainty of knowledge.

Cowardice is the avoidance of honesty, not danger. A man who says he did not join an army because he was afraid of dying is being honest. A man who claims an imaginary illness – even to himself – is a liar, who is obviously uncomfortable with his own choices, and chooses to bewilder and confuse others rather than be honest at least with himself.

Agnosticism and Religion

Many agnostics will claim courage because they ridicule and attack organized religion. The fact that we cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, they say, has profound implications for human theology, rendering any specifics about gods or their properties utterly imaginary and foolish.

This, however, does not hold logically. The alternate universe theory, as discussed above, cannot be specific only to gods, but is a universal principle that applies to everything. When the agnostic says, “We cannot disprove the existence of gods,” he is really saying, “We cannot disprove the validity of any statement.”

This is the fundamental crux of the matter. Agnosticism cannot be a principle if it only applies to gods, and there is no logical reason why it should only apply to gods, and so no human statement or belief or perspective or prejudice or bigotry can ever be proven or disproven, according to agnosticism.

For an agnostic to say that organized religion is foolish runs entirely against the basic principles of agnosticism. If I believe that my God is an invisible spider that squats in my eardrum and whispers the truths of the universe only to me, how can this possibly be contradicted according to agnosticism? In an alternate universe, this could be exactly the case. The agnostic cannot say that this is definitively false, for the moment that definitive falsehoods can be identified, the alternate universe theory collapses.

This is what is so tragic about agnosticism: agnostics often think that they are undermining religious certainty, but the exact opposite is true. By saying that every conceivable human perspective could be valid in some alternate universe, agnostics raise rank subjectivism to the status of scientific objectivity, and madness to rational skepticism. An agnostic cannot say to a racist that he is wrong, because in some other universe, the despised race might in fact be inferior! This failure to identify and apply objective and consistent principles – the very essence of philosophy – not only drops any and all rational defenses against subjective bigotries, but rather spurs them on, and elevates them to the very heights of philosophical wisdom.

Finally, agnosticism is a snake that eats itself. If we say that no human statement of truth can ever be proven or disproven, what are we to make of that statement itself? Isn’t this just another example of one of the oldest philosophical piles of sophist nonsense, the statement: “Nothing is true.” Of course, if nothing is true, the statement that nothing is true is false, which is a self-detonating position.

In the same way that agnosticism creates this magical exception for the existence of gods, it must also by the very logic of its principles create a magic exception for its own arguments. The moment that we hear the word “except” in a philosophical statement, we know that we are in the presence of Grade A nonsense. “Nothing is true – except this statement!” Meh, that isn't even philosophy, that is just a Mobius strip fortune cookie.

In the same way, when agnostics affirm that no statement can be proven or disproven, are they creating a magical exception for that statement? If so, on what basis do they create this magical exception? If not, then do they recognize the ridiculousness of their position?

The Misuses of History

When you are inventing a new idea, using the word that describes its exact opposite is a very bad idea. If I want to sell a dessert, I do not describe it as an appetizer, a mountain or a virus. If I want to sell a map, I do not describe it as a mystery novel, or switch North with South, East with West.

A man who wants to sell you something new, while describing it as something very old, is very likely a con man, looking to pass off a new table as an antique, or a cheap replica as the original.

Agnosticism is a relatively modern phenomenon; avoiding the question of God's existence is nothing new, of course, but agnosticism attempts to hook into a lot of science, particularly quantum physics, string theory and other multidimensional theoretical models.

This is little more than a transparent and obvious con.

Historically, the word “God” has never meant, “things that may exist in other dimensions of the multiverse, as described by modern physics.” “God” has never referred to some unknowable X factor,  Schrödinger's cat, the unified field theory, the cosmic craps player so derided by Einstein, or any of the other trappings of modern science.

No, let's not empty the word “God” of its true and original meaning, which was a cosmic and spiritual father who created the universe, breathed life into mankind, burns the wicked and saves the innocent, and so on. This meaty and monstrous superman, this thunderbolt-hurling patriarch of our dim and brutal histories, this frustrated and enraged slaughterer of rebels and sceptics – this fearful and omnipotent beast should not be reduced to some pale and conceptual ghost hiding out in the dim theoretical alleys between the atoms.

Using the word “God” to refer to some theoretical possibility of mind-bending modern physics is to take a word steeped in the superstitious blood of our earliest collective histories, and attempt to propel it like some time-bending slingshot forward into the future – an exercise in futility, since this old and very brittle word cracks and collapses in the face of such insane velocity.

When it was first discovered that the world was round and not flat, the word “flat” was not enlisted to describe the newly discovered roundness. When ancient mathematicians first invented the concept “zero,” they did not attempt to reuse the number one to describe it – for the simple and obvious reason that if you attempt to use the same word to describe something very different, you will spend the rest of your life trying to slice and dice peoples comprehension of your meaning. “Wait, do you mean the word ‘one’ to mean the old number one, or the new symbol for zero?”

It is so obviously inefficient to use the same word for opposite things – or even different things – that we should be immediately suspicious when this problem arises. A man who proposes calling his wife his mother, and his mother his wife, is complicating not only his relationships, but also his psyche. A cab driver who tries to start using the word “uptown” to mean “downtown” will simply annoy his customers and lose his job.

The passionate, visceral, crazed and dangerous deities of the ancient world were called “gods.” The word refers to Stone Age superstitions, not modern theoretical definitions of physics. “God” refers to not only a pre-scientific period, but an anti-scientific and anti-rationalist stage of our development, if development is even the right word. To the Egyptians of 6,000 years ago, the gods were living beings that you prayed to, feared, obeyed, and slaughtered virgins for. They joined you in war, contemplated healing you in sickness, cursed your enemies and strengthened your offspring. They did not hide in some possible alternate universe, waiting for almost 6,000 years for some scribbles on a mathematicians paper to reveal their potential hiding place.

We do not see agnostics attempting to rehabilitate the phrase “human sacrifice” by referring to it as a synonym for benevolence, because the strangeness, irrationality and quite frankly psychological problems that would be revealed by such a goal would be far too obvious.

Agnostics do not strenuously advocate for the legalization of rape, arguing that it might be moral in some other universe – yet they strenuously oppose atheists who deny the existence of God. This is a most strange position to see – surely if evil might equal good in some other universe, then violently banning evil in this universe is utterly unjust! If certainty is impossible in this universe, then surely we should start by opposing violently enforced certainties – such as physical self-defense – rather than merely strongly worded opinions, such as the fact that gods do not exist.

Yet oddly enough agnostics slither right past violently enforced views such as the evils of rape, murder, theft, parking in a handicapped zone, the non-payment of property taxes, failing to come to a proper stop at a stop sign, speeding and everything else. All these legally enforced perspectives are utterly ignored, although they are inflicted with infinitely greater absolutism than a mere philosophical argument – and the agnostic reaches with open fingers for the throat of the mere atheist!

In other words, the violent enforcement of certain perspectives is perfectly acceptable to the agnostic, but mere arguments for other perspectives must be aggressively and endlessly opposed.

This is why I call agnosticism cowardice.

And if you are still an agnostic, after reading and failing to rebut these arguments, you have well earned the label.

Conclusion

The first virtue is always honesty, and the first honesty is always with the self.

I do not for a moment imagine that agnostics have reached their conclusions by dispassionately looking at the available arguments and evidence. Agnosticism – like determinism and other forms of self-detonating superstition, arises from a fear of social attack, and a staunch denial of self-knowledge.

If you do not have the stomach to encourage the potentially rational, expose the irrational and condemn the anti-rational, you have nothing to be ashamed of. I feel queasy at the sight of blood; I’d make a terrible surgeon – but I know and accept this fact, so I don’t need to recast my queasiness as other-dimensional courage.

If you are afraid of sticking your neck out in this highly unprofitable realm, that’s completely fine. If you’re scared of how others may react to the truth, that’s natural, normal and healthy. Just – accept that. We don’t all have to be good at everything. Leave this heavy lifting to others. I don’t drill my own cavities, and you can leave the perilous advancement of reason to the philosophers.

All that we ask is that you get out of the way.

By Stefan Molyneux, MA

Host, Freedomain

Introduction

It’s hard to know whether a word can ever be rehabilitated – or whether the attempt should even be made.

Words are weapons, and can be used like any tools, for good or ill. We are all aware of the clichéd uses of such terms as “terrorists” versus “freedom fighters” etc. An atheist can be called an “unbeliever”; a theist can be called “superstitious.” A man of conviction can be called an “extremist”; a man of moderation “cowardly.” A free spirit can be called a libertine or a hedonist; a cautious introvert can be labeled a stodgy prude.

Words are also weapons of judgment – primarily moral judgment. We can say that a man can be “freed” of sin if he accepts Jesus; we can also say that he can be “freed” of irrationality if he does not. A patriot will say that a soldier “serves” his country; others may take him to task for his blind obedience. Acts considered “murderous” in peacetime are hailed as “noble” in war, and so on.

Some words can never be rehabilitated – and neither should they be. Nazi, evil, incest, abuse, rape, murder – these are all words which describe the blackest impulses of the human soul, and can never be turned to a good end. Edmund may say in King Lear, “Evil, be thou my good!” but we know that he is not speaking paradoxically; he is merely saying “that which others call evil – my self-interest – is good for me.”

The word “anarchy” may be almost beyond redemption – any attempt to find goodness in it could well be utterly futile – or worse; the philosophical equivalent of the clichéd scene in hospital dramas where the surgeon blindly refuses to give up on a clearly dead patient.

Perhaps I’m engaged in just such a fool’s quest in this little book. Perhaps the word “anarchy” has been so abused throughout its long history, so thrown into the pit of incontestable human iniquity that it can never be untangled from the evils that supposedly surround it.

What images spring to mind when you hear the word “anarchy”? Surely it evokes mad riots of violence and lawlessness – a post-apocalyptic Darwinian free-for-all where the strong and evil dominate the meek and reasonable. Or perhaps you view it as a mad political agenda, a thin ideological cover for murderous desires and cravings for assassinations, where wild-eyed, mustachioed men with thick hair and thicker accents roll cartoon bombs under the ornate carriages of slowly-waving monarchs. Or perhaps you view “anarchy” as more of a philosophical specter; the haunted and angry mutterings of over-caffeinated and seemingly-eternal grad students; a nihilistic surrender to all that is seductive and evil in human nature, a hurling off the cliff of self-restraint, and a savage plunge into the mad magic of the moment, without rules, without plans, without a future…

If your teenage son were to come home to you one sunny afternoon and tell you that he had become an anarchist, you would likely feel a strong urge to check his bag for black hair dye, fresh nose rings, clumpy mascara and dirty needles. His announcement would very likely cause a certain trapdoor to open under your heart, where you may fear that it might fall forever. The heavy syllables of words like “intervention,” “medication,” “boot camp,” and “intensive therapy” would probably accompany the thudding of your quickened pulse.

All this may well be true, of course – I may be thumping the chest of a broken patient long since destined for the morgue, but certain… insights, you could say, or perhaps correlations, continue to trouble me immensely, and I cannot shake the fear that it is not anarchy that lies on the table, clinging to life – but rather, the truth.

I will take a paragraph or two to try and communicate what troubles me so much about the possible injustice of throwing the word “anarchy” into the pit of evil – if I have not convinced you by the end of the next page that something very unjust may be afoot, then I will have to continue my task of resurrection with others, because I do not for a moment imagine that I would ever convince you to call something good that is in fact evil.

And neither would I want to.

Now the actual meaning of the word “anarchy” is (from the OED):

1. Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder.
2. A theoretical social state in which there is no governing person or body of persons, but each individual has absolute liberty
   (without implication of disorder).

Thus we can see that the word “anarchy” represents two central meanings: an absence of both government and social order, and an absence of government with no implication of social disorder.

Without a government…

What does that mean in practice?

Well, clearly there are two kinds of leaders in this world – those who lead by incentive, and those who lead by force. Those who lead by incentive will offer you a salary to come and work for them; those who lead by force will throw you in jail if you do not pick up a gun and fight for them.

Those who lead by incentive will try to get you to voluntarily send your children to their schools by keeping their prices reasonable, their classes stimulating, and demonstrating proven and objective success.

Those who lead by force will simply tell you that if you do not pay the property taxes to fund their schools, you will be thrown in jail.

Clearly, this is the difference between voluntarism and violence.

The word “anarchy” does not mean “no rules.” It does not mean “kill others for fun.” It does not mean “no organization.”

It simply means: “without a political leader.”

The difference, of course, between politics and every other area of life is that in politics, if you do not obey the government, you are thrown in jail. If you try to defend yourself against the people who come to throw you in jail, they will shoot you.

So – what does the word “anarchy” really mean?

It simply means a way of interacting with others without threatening them with violence if they do not obey.

It simply means “without political violence.”

The difference between this word and words like “murder” and “rape” is that we do not mix murder and rape with the exact opposite actions in our life, and consider the results normal, moral and healthy. We do not strangle a man in the morning, then help a woman across the street in the afternoon, and call ourselves “good.”

The true evils that we all accept – rape, assault, murder, theft – are never considered a core and necessary part of the life of a good person. An accused murderer does not get to walk free by pointing out that he spent all but five seconds of his life not killing someone.

With those acknowledged evils, one single transgression changes the moral character of an entire life. You would never be able to think of a friend who is convicted of rape in the same way again.

However – this is not the case with “anarchy” – it does not fit into that category of “evil” at all.

When we think of a society without political violence – without governments – these specters of chaos and brutality always arise for us, immediately and, it would seem, irrevocably.

However, it only takes a moment of thought to realize that we live the vast majority of our actual lives in complete and total anarchy – and call such anarchy “morally good.”

Everyday Anarchy

For instance, take dating, marriage and family.

In any reasonably free society, these activities do not fall in the realm of political coercion. No government agency chooses who you are to marry and have children with, and punishes you with jail for disobeying their rulings. Voluntarism, incentive, mutual advantage – dare we say “advertising”? – all run the free market of love, sex and marriage.

What about your career? Did a government official call you up at the end of high school and inform you that you were to become a doctor, a lawyer, a factory worker, a waiter, an actor, a programmer – or a philosopher? Of course not. You were left free to choose the career that best matched your interests, abilities and initiative.

What about your major financial decisions? Each month, does a government agent come to your house and tell you exactly how much you should save, how much you should spend, whether you can afford that new couch or old painting? Did you have to apply to the government to buy a new car, a new house, a plasma television or a toothbrush?

No, in all the areas mentioned above – love, marriage, family, career, finances – we all make our major decisions in the complete absence of direct political coercion.

Thus – if anarchy is such an all-consuming, universal evil, why is it the default – and virtuous – freedom that we demand in order to achieve just liberty in our daily lives?

If the government told you tomorrow that it was going to choose for you where to live, how to earn your keep, and who to marry – would you fall to your knees and thank the heavens that you have been saved from such terrible anarchy – the anarchy of making your own decisions in the absence of direct political coercion?

Of course not – quite the opposite – you would be horrified, and would oppose such an encroaching dictatorship with all your might.

This is what I mean when I say that we consider anarchy to be an irreducible evil – and also an irreducible good. It is both feared and despised – and considered necessary and virtuous.

If you were told that tomorrow you would wake up and there would be no government, you would doubtless fear the specter of “anarchy.”

If you were told tomorrow that you would have to apply for a government permit to have children, you would doubtless fear the specter of “dictatorship,” and long for the days of “anarchy,” when you could decide such things without the intervention of political coercion.

Thus we can see that we human beings are deeply, almost ferociously ambivalent about “anarchy.” We desperately desire it in our personal lives, and just as desperately fear it politically.

Another way of putting this is that we love the anarchy we live, and yet fear the anarchy we imagine.

One more point, and then you can decide whether my patient is beyond hope or not.

It has been pointed out that a totalitarian dictatorship is characterized by the almost complete absence of rules. When Solzhenitsyn was arrested, he had no idea what he was really being charged with, and when he was given his 10-year sentence, there was no court of appeal, or any legal proceedings whatsoever. He had displeased someone in power, and so it was off to the gulags with him!

When we examine countries where government power is at its greatest, we see situations of extreme instability, and a marked absence of objective rules or standards. The tinpot dictatorships of third world countries are regions arbitrarily and violently ruled by gangs of sociopathic thugs.

Closer to home, for most of us, is the example of inner-city government-run schools, ringed by metal detectors, and saturated with brutality, violence, sexual harassment, and bullying. The surrounding neighborhoods are also under the tight control of the state, which runs welfare programs, public housing, the roads, the police, the buses, the hospitals, the sewers, the water, the electricity and just about everything else in sight. These sorts of neighborhoods have moved beyond democratic socialism, and actually lie closer to dictatorial communism.

Similarly, when we think of these inner cities as a whole, we can also understand that the majority of the endemic violence results from the drug trade, which directly resulted from government bans on the manufacture and sale of certain kinds of drugs. Treating drug addiction rather than arresting addicts would, it is estimated, reduce criminal activity by up to 80%.

Here, again, where there is a concentration of political power, we see violence, mayhem, shootings, stabbings, rapes and all the attendant despair and nihilism – everything that “anarchism” is endlessly accused of!

What about prisons, where political power is surely at its greatest? Prisons seethe with rapes, murders, stabbings and assaults – not to mention drug addiction. Sadistic guards beat on sadistic prisoners, to the point where the only difference at times seems to be the costumes. Here we have a “society” that seems like a parody of “anarchy” – a nihilistic and ugly universe usually described by the word “anarchy” which actually results from a maximization of political power, or the exact opposite of “anarchy.”

Now, we certainly could argue that yes, it may be true that an excess of political power breeds anarchy – but that a deficiency of political power breeds anarchy as well! Perhaps “order” is a sort of Aristotelian mean, which lies somewhere between the chaos of a complete absence of political coercion, and the chaos of an excess of political coercion.

However, we utterly reject that approach in the other areas mentioned above – love, marriage, finances, career etc. We understand that any intrusion of political coercion into these realms would be a complete disaster for our freedoms. We do not say, with regards to marriage, “Well, we wouldn’t want the government choosing everyone’s spouse – but neither do we want the government having no involvement in choosing people spouses! The correct amount of government coercion lies somewhere in the middle.”

No, we specifically and unequivocally reject the intrusion of political coercion into such personal aspects of our lives.

Thus once more we must at least recognize the basic paradox that we desperately need and desire the reality of anarchy in our personal lives – and yet desperately hate and fear the idea of anarchy in our political environment.

We love the anarchy we live. We fear the anarchy we imagine – the anarchy we are taught to fear.

Until we can discuss the realities of our ambivalence towards this kind of voluntarism, we shall remain fundamentally stuck as a species – like any individual who wallpapers over his ambivalence, we shall spend our lives in distracted and oscillating avoidance, to the detriment of our own present, and our children’s future.

This is why I cannot just let this patient die. I still feel a heartbeat – and a strong one too!

Ambivalence and Bigotry

It is a truism – and I for one think a valid one – that the simple mind sees everything in black or white. Wisdom, on the other hand, involves being willing to suffer the doubts and complexities of ambivalence.

The dark-minded bigot says that all blacks are perfidious; the light-minded bigot says that all blacks are victims. The misogynist says that all women are corrupt; the feminist often says that all women are saints.

Exploring the complexities and contradictions of life with an open-minded fairness – neither with the imposition of premature judgment, nor the withholding of judgment once the evidence is in – is the mark of the scientist, the philosopher – of a rational mind.

The fundamentalists among us ascribe all mysteries to the “will of God” – which answers nothing at all, since when examined, the “will of God” turns out to be just another mystery; it is like saying that the location of my lost keys is “the place where my keys are not lost” – it adds nothing to the equation other than a teeth-gritting tautology. Mystery equals mystery. Anyone with more than half a brain can do little more than roll his eyes.

The immaturity of jumping to premature and useless conclusions is matched on the other hand only by the shallow and frightened fogs of modern – or perhaps I should say post-modern – relativism, where no conclusions are ever valid, no absolute statements are ever just – except that one of course – and everything is exploration, typically blindfolded, and without a compass. There is no destination, no guidepost, no sense of progress, no building to a greater goal – it is the endless dissection of cultural cadavers without even a definition of health or purpose, which thus comes perilously close to looking like fetishistic sadism.

The simple truth is that some black men are good, and some black men are bad, and most black men are a mixture, just as we all are. Some women are treacherous; some women are saints. “Blackness” or “gender” is an utterly useless metric when it comes to evaluating a person morally; it is about as helpful as trying to use an iPod to determine which way is north. The phrase “sexual penetration” does not tell us whether the act is consensual or not – saying that sexual penetration is always evil is as useless as saying that it is always good.

In the same way, some anarchism is good (notably that which we treasure so much in our personal lives) and some anarchism is bad (notably our fears of violent chaos, bomb-throwing and large mustaches). As a word, however, “anarchism” does nothing to help us evaluate these situations. Applying foolish black-and-white thinking to complex and ambiguous situations is just another species of bigotry

Claiming that “anarchism” is both rank political evil and the greatest treasure in our personal lives is a contradiction well worth examining, if we wish to gain some measure of mature wisdom about the essential questions of truth, virtue and the moral challenges of social organization.

Anarchy and History

Our clichéd vision of the typical anarchist tends to see him emerging shortly before World War I, which is very interesting when you think about it. The stereotypical anarchist is portrayed as a feverish failure, who uses his political ideology as a self-righteous cover for his lust for violence. He claims he wishes to free the world from tyranny, when in fact all he wants to do is to break bones and take lives.

We typically view this anarchist as a form of terrorist, which is generally defined as someone committed to the use of violence to achieve political ends, and place both in the same category as those who attempt a military coup against an existing government.

However, when you break it down logically, it seems almost impossible to provide a definition of terrorism which does not also include political leaders, or at least the political process itself.

The act of war is itself an attempt to achieve political ends through the use of violence – the annexation of property, the capturing of a new tax base, or the overthrow of a foreign government – and it always requires a government that is willing and able to increase the use of violence against its own citizens, through tax increases and/or the military draft. Even defending a country against invasion inevitably requires an escalation of the use of force against domestic citizens.

Thus how can we easily divide those outside the political process who use violence to achieve their goals from those within the political process who use violence to achieve their goals? It remains a daunting task, to say the least.

What is fascinating about the mythology of the “evil anarchists” – and mythology it is – is that even if we accept the stereotype, the disparity in body counts between the anarchists and their enemies remains staggeringly misrepresented, to say the least.

Anarchists in the period before the First World War killed perhaps a dozen or a score of people, almost all of them state heads or their representatives.

On the other hand, state heads or their representatives caused the deaths of over 10 million people through the First World War.

If we value human life – as any reasonable and moral person must – then fearing anarchists rather than political leaders is like fearing spontaneous combustion rather than heart disease. In the category of “causing deaths,” a single government leader outranks all anarchists tens of thousands of times.

Does this seem like a surprising perspective to you? Ah, well that is what happens when you look at the facts of the world rather than the stories of the victors.

Another example would be an objective examination of murder and violence in 19^th-century America. The typical story about the “Wild West” is that it was a land populated by thieves, brigands and murderers, where only the “thin blue line” of the lone local sheriffs stood between the helpless townspeople and the endless predations of swarthy and unshaven villains.

If we look at the simple facts, though, and contrast the declining 19^th century US murder rates with the 600,000 murders committed in the span of a few years by the government-run Civil War, we can see that the sheriffs were not particularly dedicated to protecting the helpless townspeople, but rather delivering their money, their lives and their children to the state through the brutal enforcement of taxation and military enslavement.

When we look at an institution such as slavery, we can see that it survived, fundamentally, on two central pillars – patronizing and fear-mongering mythologies, and the shifting of the costs of enforcement to others.

What justifications were put forward, for instance, for the enslavement of blacks? Well, the “white man’s burden,” or the need to “Christianize” and civilize these savage heathens – this was the condescension – and also because if the slaves were turned free, plantations would be burned to the ground, pale-throated women would be savagely violated, and all the endless torments of violence and destruction would be wreaked upon society – this was the fear-mongering mythology!

Slavery as an institution could not conceivably survive economically if the slave owners had to pay for the actual expense of slavery themselves. Shifting the costs of the capture, imprisonment and return of slaves to the general taxpayer was the only way that slavery could remain profitable. The use of the political coercion required to make slavery profitable, of course, generates a great demand for mythological “cover-ups,” or ideological distractions from the violence at the core of the institution. Thus violence always requires intellectualization, which is why governments always want to fund higher education and subsidize intellectuals. We shall get to more of this later.

Even outside war, in the 20^th century alone, more than 270 million people were murdered by their governments. Compared to the few dozen murders committed by anarchists, it is hard to see how the fantasy of the “evil anarchist” could possibly be sustained when we compare the tiny pile of anarchist bodies to the virtual Everest of the dead heaped by governments in one century alone.

Surely if we are concerned about violence, murder, theft and rape, we should focus on those who commit the most evils – political leaders – rather than those who oppose them, even misguidedly. If we accept that political leaders murder mankind by the hundreds of millions, then we may even be tempted to have a shred of sympathy for these “evil anarchists,” just as we would for a man who shoots down a rampaging mass murderer.

Anarchy and Ambivalence

The truth of the matter is that, as I stated above, it is clear that we have a love/hate relationship with anarchy. We yearn for it, and we fear it, in almost equal measure.

We love personal anarchy, and fear political anarchy. We desperately resist any encroachment or limitation upon our personal anarchy – and fear, mock and attack any suggestion that political anarchy could be of value.

But – how can it be possible that anarchy is both the greatest good and the greatest evil simultaneously? Surely that would make a mockery of reason, virtue and basic common sense.

Now we shall turn to a possible way of unraveling this contradiction.

Politics and Self-Interest

Truth is so often the first casualty of self-interest. In the realm of advertising, we can see this very clearly – the company that sells an anti-aging cream uses fear and insecurity to drive demand for its product. “Your beauty is measured by the elasticity of your skin, not the virtue of your soul,” they say, “and no one will find you attractive if you do not look young!”

This is a rather shallow exploitation of insecurity; clearly what is really being sold is a definition of “beauty” that does not require the challenging task of achieving and maintaining virtue. In the short run, it is far easier, after all, to rub overpriced cream on your face than it is to start down the path of genuine wisdom and integrity.

In this way, we can see that the self-interest of the advertiser and the consumer are both being served in the exchange, at the expense of the truth. We all know that we shall become old and ugly – and also that this fate need not rob us of love, but rather that we can receive and give more love in our dotage than we did in our youth, if we live with virtue, compassion and generosity.

However, there is far less money to be made in philosophy than there is in vanity – which is another way of saying that people will pay good money to avoid the demands of virtue – and so the mutual exploitation of shallow avoidance is a cornerstone of any modern economy.

In the same way, being told that “anarchism” is just bad, bad, bad helps us avoid the anxiety and ambivalence we in fact feel about that which we both fear and love at the same time. Our educational and political leaders “sell” us relief from ambivalence and uncomfortable exploration – inevitably, at the expense of truth – and so far, we have been relatively eager consumers.

Self-Interest and Exploitation

The CEOs of large companies receive enormous salaries for their services. Let us imagine a scenario wherein a small number of new companies grow despite having no senior managers – and appear to be making above-average profits to boot!

In this scenario, when business leadership is revealed as potentially counterproductive to profitability – or at least, unrelated to profitability – it is easy to see that the self-interest of business leaders is immediately and perhaps permanently threatened.

In addition, picture all the other groups and people whose interests would be harmed in such a scenario. Business schools would see their enrollment numbers drop precipitously; the lawyers, accountants and decorators who served these business leaders would see the demand for their services dropping; the private schools that catered to the families of the rich would be hard hit, at least for a time. Elite magazines, business shows, conventions, life coaches, haberdashers, tailors and all other sorts of other people would feel the sting of the transition, to put it mildly.

We can easily imagine that the first few companies to see increased profitability as a result of ditching their senior managers would be roundly condemned and mocked by the entrenched managers in similar companies. These companies would be accused of “cooking the books,” of exploiting a mere statistical anomaly or fluke, of having secret managers, of producing shoddy goods, of “stuffing the pipe” with premature sales, of actually running at a loss, and so on.

Their imminent demise would be gleefully predicted by most if not all self-interested onlookers. The CEOs of existing companies would avoid doing business with them, and would doubtless combine a patronizing “benevolence” (“Yes, you do see these trends emerge once every few years – they bubble up, falter, and die out, and investors end up poorer but wiser”) with fairly-open fear-mongering (“I’m not sure that it is a good career move to work at these sort of companies; I would consider it a rather black mark on the resume of any job-seeker…”) and so on.

Should these new companies continue to grow, doubtless the existing business executives would get in touch with their political friends, seeking for a political “solution” on behalf of the “consumers” they wished to “protect.”

Entrenched groups will always move to protect their own self-interest – this is not a bad thing, it is simply a fact of human nature. It is thus important to understand that what is called unproductive, negative, “extreme” or dangerous may indeed be so, but it is always worth looking at the motives of those who invest the time and energy to create and propagate such labels. Why are they so interested?

The Robber Barons

We can also find examples of this in the phenomenon of the “Robber Barons” in late 19^th century America. The story goes that these amoral predatory monopolists were fleecing a helpless public, and so had to be restrained through the force of government anti-monopoly legislation.

If this story were really true, the first thing that we would expect is a 1-2 punch of evidence showing how prices were rising where these “monopolies” flourished – and also that it was these helpless and enraged consumers who thumped the ears of their legislators and demanded protection from the monopolists.

Of course, it would be purely absurd to imagine that this was the case, and it turns out to be a complete falsehood.

If an unjust price increase of 10%-20% was imposed upon ground beef, the net loss to the average consumer would be no more than a few pennies a week. It is incomprehensible to imagine any consumer – or group of consumers – combining their time and effort to pursue complex and lengthy legislation for the sake of opposing a tiny price increase. The cost/benefit ratio would be absurdly out of balance, since it would doubtless cost most of these consumers far more in time and money to pursue such action than they could conceivably save by reducing such an unjust price increase.

Are you pursuing legal action against Exxon for higher gas prices?

Of course not.

Thus to find the real culprits, we must first look at any group which can justify the pursuit of such complex and uncertain legislation; the purchasing of legislators, the writing of articles and other efforts spent to influence the media, the desperate pursuit of a highly risky venture – who could possibly justify such a mad investment?

The answer is obvious, and contains all the information we need to know to disprove the claims put forward.

The groups most harmed by these supposed-monopolists were, of course, their direct competitors. Thus we would expect that the primary – if not sole – sponsors of this legislation would not be the outraged consumers, but rather the companies competing with these “Robber Barons.”

Clearly, if these monopolists were unjustly increasing prices, this would be an endless invitation for these competitors – or even outside entrepreneurs – to undercut their prices.

Ah, but perhaps these Robber Barons were achieving their monopolies through preferential political favors such as forcibly keeping competitors from entering the market.

Well, we know for certain that this could not be the case. If these Robber Barons actually did own the legislature, then their competitors would be highly unlikely to take the step of attempting to influence the legislature, because they would know it was a fight they could not win. If these “monopolists” were gaining massive and unjust profits through political favors, then their competitors who were shut out of such a lucrative system would be completely unable to funnel as much money to the legislators. Furthermore, those making the laws would be exposed to blackmail for past deals if they “switched sides” so to speak.

Thus without examining a single historical fact, we can very easily determine what actually happened, which was that:

1. The monopolists were not actually raising prices, but were lowering them, which we know because their competitors did not take
   the economic route of undercutting on price, but rather the political route of using the force of the state to cripple these “monopolists.”
   
   
2. The monopolists were not gaining market share or unjust profits through political means, because the legislatures
   were still available for sale.
   
   
3. The consumers were entirely happy with the existing arrangement, which we know because the competitors had
   nothing to offer that the consumers would prefer to the existing state of things.
   

This hypothesis is amply borne out by the accurate historical evidence. Where these “Robber Barons” dominated the market, the prices of the goods they produced went down, sometimes considerably – in the case of using refrigerated railcars to store meat, a price drop of 30% was achieved in the span of a few months.

Clearly, this did not harm the interests of the consumer – but it did harm the self-interest of those attempting to compete with these highly-efficient businesses. Sadly – though, with the temptation of the government ever-present, inevitably it seems – these competitors preferred to take the political route of attacking their successful rivals through the power of the state rather than attempting to innovate themselves in turn and compete more successfully in the free market.

What about the argument that the Robber Barons used violence to create their monopolies, by threatening or killing competing workers?

Well, even if we accept this argument as true, it serves the anarchistic argument far more than the statist position.

If you hired a security guard who continually fell asleep on the job, and permitted the facility he guarded to be robbed over and over again, year after year, what would your reaction be? Would you wake him up and promote him to the rank of global manager of a highly complex security company? Would his rank incompetence at a simple task make him your ideal candidate for an enormously complex job?

Of course not.

If a government is so amoral and incompetent that it permits the murder of innocent citizens by the Robber Barons, then clearly it cannot conceivably be competent and moral enough to protect citizens from the complex economic predations of the same Robber Barons. A group that cannot perform a simple function cannot conceivably perform a far more complex function.

Over a hundred years later, we can still see how effective this propaganda really is. The specters of these “Robber Barons” still inhabit the imaginary haunted houses of our history. The role of government in controlling exploitive monopolies remains unquestioned – and how many people know the basic facts of the situation, principally that it was not the consumers who opposed these companies, but their competitors?

When we look at political “solutions” to pressing “problems,” we see the same pattern over and over again. Government-run education was not instituted because parents were dissatisfied with private schools, or because children were not educated, or anything like that – but rather because the teachers wanted the job security, and cultural and religious busybodies wanted to get their hands on the tender minds of children. The “New Deal” in the 1930s was not instituted because the free market made people poor, but rather because government mismanagement of the money supply destroyed almost a quarter of the wealth of the United States.

Time and time again, we see that it is not freedom that leads to political control and an increase in state violence, but rather prior increases in political control and state violence.

The government does not expand its control because freedom does not work; freedom does not work because the government expands its control.

Thus we can see that freedom – or voluntarism, or anarchy – does not create problems that governments are required to “solve.” Rather, propagandists lie about what the government is up to (“protecting consumers” really means “using violence to protect the profits of inefficient businesses”) and the resulting expansions of political coercion and control breeds more problems, which are always ascribed to freedom.

Anarchy and Political Leaders

Clearly, there exists an entire class of people who gain immense profit, prestige and power from the existence of the government. It is equally true that, as a collective, these people have enormous control and influence over the minds of children, since it is that same government that educates virtually every child for six or more hours a day, five days a week, for almost a decade and a half of their formative years.

To analogize this situation, can we imagine that we would be at all surprised that children who came out of 14 years of religious indoctrination would in general believe in the existence and virtue of God? Would we be at all surprised if the strong arguments for atheism were left off a curriculum expressly designed by the priests, who directly profit from the maintenance of religious belief? In fact, we would fully expect such children to be actively trained in the rejection of arguments for atheism – inoculated against it, so to speak, so that they would react with scorn or hostility to such arguments.

We may as well hold our breath waiting for the next commercial from General Motors talking about the shortcomings of their own cars, and the virtues of their competitors’ vehicles. Or perhaps we should wait for a full-color spread from McDonald’s depicting detailed pictures of clogged arteries?

If so, we will wait in vain.

Similarly, when the government trains the children, how do we expect the government to portray itself? Would we expect government-paid teachers to talk openly about the root of state power, which is the initiation of the use of force against legally-disarmed citizens? Would we expect them to openly and honestly talk about the source of their income, which is the property taxes that are forcibly extracted from their students’ parents?

Would we expect these same teachers to talk about how government power grows through the endless pressure and greed of special interest groups, who wish to offload the costs of the violent enforcement of their greed on the taxpayers that they in fact prey upon?

Of course not.

This is not because these teachers are evil, but rather because people respond to incentives. If the basic truths of history, logic, ethics and reality are inconvenient to those in power – as they inevitably are – those paid by those in power will almost never talk about them. We would not expect a Stalinist-era teacher to speak of the glories of capitalism; we would not expect an Antebellum teacher to teach the children of slave-owners about the evils of slavery; we would not expect an instructor at West Point to talk about the evils and corruption of the military-industrial complex, any more than we would expect the Vatican to voluntarily initiate a discussion of child abuse by Catholic priests.

We can view these basic facts without bottomless rancor, but with a gentle, almost kindly sympathy towards the inevitable trickle-down and corrupting effects of violent power.

It is no doubt a dizzying perspective to begin to examine the dark, dank and foggy jungle of propaganda with the simple light of truth, but that is what an anarchist is really all about.

An anarchist accepts the simple and basic reality that every single human being fundamentally values free choice in his or her own personal life.

An anarchist accepts the simple and basic reality that he who pays the piper always calls the tune – and that arguments against the virtue and efficacy of political power will never be disseminated in an educational system paid for by political power.

An anarchist accepts the simple and basic reality that human beings at best have an ambivalent relationship with voluntarism – and that human beings habitually avoid the discomfort of ambivalence, and so don’t want to talk about anarchism any more then they want to bring up their doubts about religion during a Christian wedding ceremony.

The barriers to a reasonable understanding of the anarchistic perspective are emotionally volatile, socially isolating and almost endless. The reasonable anarchist accepts these basic facts – since facts are what anarchy is all about – and if he is truly wise, falls at least a little in love with the difficulties of his task.

We should love the difficulties we face, because if it were easy to free the world, the fact that the world is so far from being free would be completely incomprehensible…

Anarchy and the “Problem of the Commons”

Ask almost any professional economist what the role of government is, and he will generally reply that it is to regulate or solve the “problem of the commons,” and to make up for “market failures,” or the provision of public goods such as roads and water delivery that the free market cannot achieve on its own.

To anyone who works from historical evidence and even a basic smattering of first principles, this answer is, to be frank, outlandishly unfounded.

The “problem of the commons” is the idea that if farmers share common ground for grazing their sheep, that each farmer has a personal incentive for overgrazing, which will harm everyone in general. Thus the immediate self-interest of each individual leads to a collective stripping of the land.

It only takes a moment’s thought to realize that the government is the worst possible solution for this problem – if indeed it is a problem.

The problem of the commons recognizes that where collective ownership exists, individual exploitation will inevitably result, since there is no incentive for the long-term maintenance of the productivity of whatever is collectively owned. A farmer takes good care of his own fields, because he wants to profit from their utilization in the future. In fact, ownership tends to accrue to those individuals who can make the most productive future use of an asset, since they are the ones able to bid the most when it comes up for sale. If I can make $10,000 a year more out of a patch of land than you can, then I will be willing to bid more for it, and thus will end up owning it.

Thus where there is no stake in future profitability – as in the case of publicly-owned resources – those resources inevitably tend to be pillaged and destroyed.

This is the situation that highly intelligent, well-educated people – with perfectly straight faces – say should be solved through the creation of a government.

Why is this such a bizarre solution?

Well, a government – and particularly the public treasury – is the ultimate publicly-owned good. If publicly-owned goods are always pillaged and exploited, then how is the creation of the largest and most violent publicly-owned good supposed to solve that problem? It’s like saying that exposure to sunlight can be dangerous for a person’s health, and so the solution to that problem is to throw people into the sun.

The fact that people can repeat these absurdities with perfectly straight faces is testament to the power of propaganda and self-interest.

In the same way, we are told that free-market monopolies are dangerous and exploitive. Companies that wish to voluntarily do business with us, and must appeal to our self-interest, to mutual advantage, are considered grave threats to our personal freedoms.

And – the solution that is proposed by almost everyone to the “problem” of voluntary economic interaction?

Well, since voluntary and peaceful “monopolies” are so terribly evil, the solution that is always proposed is to create an involuntary, coercive, and violent monopoly in the form of a government.

Thus voluntary and peaceful “monopolies” are a great evil – but the involuntary and violent monopoly of the state is the greatest good!?

Can you see why I began this book talking about our complicated and ambivalent relationship to voluntarism, or anarchy?

We see this same pattern repeating itself in the realm of education. Whenever an anarchist talks about a stateless society, he is inevitably informed that in a free society, poor children will not get educated.

Where does this opinion come from? Does it come from a steadfast dedication to reason and evidence, an adherence to well-documented facts? Do those who hold this opinion have certain evidence that, prior to public education, the children of the poor were not being educated? Do they genuinely believe that the children of the poor are being well-educated now? Do they seriously believe that anarchists do not care about the education of the poor? Do they believe that they are the only people who care about the education of the poor?

Of course not. This is a mere knee-jerk propagandistic reaction, like hearing a Soviet-era Red Guard boy mumbling about the necessity of the workers controlling the means of production. It is not based upon evidence, but upon prejudice.

If the “problem of the commons” and the predations of monopolies are such dire threats, then surely institutionalizing these problems and surrounding them with the endless violence of police, military and prisons would be the exact opposite of a rational solution!

Of course, the problem of the commons is only a problem because the land is collectively owned; move it to private ownership, and all is well. Thus the solution to the problem of public ownership is clearly more private ownership, not more public ownership.

Ah, say the statists, but that is just a metaphor – what about fish in the ocean, pollution in the rivers, roads in the city and the defense of the realm?

Well the simple answer to that – from an anarchist perspective at least – is that if people are not intelligent and reasonable enough to negotiate solutions to these problems in a productive and sustainable manner, then surely they are also not intelligent or reasonable enough to vote for political leaders, or participate in any government whatsoever.

Of course, there are endless historical examples of private roads and railways, private fisheries, social and economic ostracism as an effective punishment for over-use or pollution of shared resources – the endless inventiveness of our species should surely by now never fail to amaze!

The statist looks at a problem and always sees a gun as the only solution – the force of the state, the brutality of law, violence and punishment. The anarchist – the endless entrepreneur of social organization – always looks at a problem and sees an opportunity for peaceful, innovative, charitable or profitable problem-solving.

The statist looks at a population and sees an irrational and selfish horde that needs to be endlessly herded around at gunpoint – and yet looks at those who run the government as selfless, benevolent and saintly. Yet these same statists always look at this irrational and dangerous population and say: “You must have the right to choose your political leaders!”

It is truly an unsustainable and irrational set of positions.

An anarchist – like any good economist or scientist – is more than happy to look at a problem and say, “I do not know the solution” – and be perfectly happy not imposing a solution through force.

Darwin looked at the question, “Where did life come from?” and only came up with his famous answer because he was willing to admit that he did not know – but that existing religious “answers” were invalid. Theologians, on the other hand, claim to “answer” the same question with: “God made life,” which as mentioned above, on closer examination, always turns out to be an exact synonym for: “I do not know.” To say, “God did it,” is to say that some unknowable being performed some incomprehensible action in a completely mysterious manner for some never-to-be-discovered end.

In other words: “I haven’t a clue.”

In the same way, when faced with challenges of social organization such as collective self-defense, roads, pollution and so on, the anarchist is perfectly content to say, “I do not know how this problem will be solved.” As a corollary, however, the anarchist is also perfectly certain that the pseudo-answer of “the government will do it” is a total non-answer – in fact, it is an anti-answer, in that it provides the illusion of an answer where one does not in fact exist. To an anarchist, saying “the government will solve the problem,” has as much credibility as telling a biologist – usually with grating condescension – “God created life.” In both cases, the problem of infinite regression is blindly ignored – if that which exists must have been created by a God, the God which exists must have been created by another God, and so on. In the same way, if human beings are in general too irrational and selfish to work out the challenges of social organization in a productive and positive manner, then they are far too irrational and selfish to be given the monopolistic violence of state power, or vote for their leaders.

Asking an anarchist how every conceivable existing public function could be re-created in a stateless society is directly analogous to asking an economist what the economy will look like down to the last detail 50 years from now. What will be invented? How will interplanetary contracts be enforced? Exactly how will time travel affect the price of a rental car? What megahertz will computers be running at? What will operating systems be able to do? And so on and so on.

This is all a kind of elaborate game designed to, fundamentally, stall and humiliate any economist who falls for it. A certain amount of theorizing is always fun, of course, but the truth is not determined by accurate long-term predictions of the unknowable. Asking Albert Einstein in 1910 where the atomic bomb will be dropped in the future is not a credible question – and the fact that he is unable to answer it in no way invalidates the theory of relativity.

In the same way, we can imagine that abolitionists would have been asked exactly how society would look 20 years after the slaves were freed. How many of them would have jobs? What would the average number of kids per family be? Who would be working the plantations?

Though these questions may sound absurd to many people, when you propose even the vague possibility of a society without a government, you are almost inevitably maneuvered into the position of fighting a many-headed hydra of exactly such questions: “How will the roads be provided in the absence of a government?” “How will the poor be educated?” “How will a stateless society defend itself?” “How can people without a government deal with violent criminals?”

In 25 years of talking about just these subjects, I have almost never – even after credibly answering every question that comes my way – had someone sit back, sigh and say, “Gee, I guess it really could work!”

No, inevitably, what happens is that they come up with some situation that I cannot answer immediately, or in a way that satisfies them, and then they sit back and say in triumph, “You see? Society just cannot work without a government!”

What is actually quite funny about this situation is that by taking this approach, people think that they are opposing the idea of anarchy, when in fact they are completely supporting it.

One simple and basic fact of life is that no individual – or group of individuals – can ever be wise or knowledgeable enough to run society.

Our core fantasy of “government” is that in some remote and sunlit chamber, with lacquered mahogany tables, deep leather chairs and sleepless men and women, there exists a group who are so wise, so benevolent, so omniscient and so incorruptible that we should turn over to them the education of our children, the preservation of our elderly, the salvation of the poor, the provision of vital services, the healing of the sick, the defense of the realm and of property, the administration of justice, the punishment of criminals, and the regulation of virtually every aspect of a massive, infinitely complex and ever-changing social and economic system. These living man-gods have such perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom that we should hand them weapons of mass destruction, and the endless power to tax, imprison and print money – and nothing but good, plenty and virtue will result.

And then, of course, we say that the huddled and bleating masses, who could never achieve such wisdom and virtue, not even in their wildest dreams, should all get together and vote to surrender half their income, their children, their elderly and the future itself to these man-gods.

Of course, we never do get to actually see and converse with these deities. When we do actually listen to politicians, all we hear are pious sentiments, endless evasions, pompous speeches and all of the emotionally manipulative tricks of a bed-ridden and abusive parent.

Are these the demi-gods whose only mission is the care, nurturing and education of our precious children’s minds?

Perhaps we can speak to the experts who advise them, the men behind the throne, the shadowy puppet-masters of pure wisdom and virtue? Can they come forward and reveal to us the magnificence of their knowledge? Why no, these men and women also will not speak to us, or if they do, they turn out to be even more disappointing than their political masters, who at least can make stirring if empty phrases ring out across a crowded hall.

And so, if we like, we can wander these halls of Justice, Truth and Virtue forever, opening doors and asking questions, without ever once meeting this plenary council of moral superheroes. We can shuffle in ever-growing disappointment through the messy offices of these mere mortals, and recognize in them a dusty mirror of ourselves – no more, certainly, and often far less.

Anarchy is the simple recognition that no man, woman, or group thereof is ever wise enough to come up with the best possible way to run other people’s lives. Just as no one else should be able to enforce on you his choice of a marriage partner, or compel you to follow a career of his choosing, no one else should be able to enforce his preferences for social organization upon you.

Thus when the anarchist is expected to answer every possible question regarding how society will be organized in the absence of a government, any failure to perfectly answer even one of them completely validates the anarchist’s position.

If we recognize that no individual has the capacity to run society (“dictatorship”), and we recognize that no group of elites has the capacity to run society (“aristocracy”), we are then forced to defend the moral and practical absurdity of “democracy.”

Anarchy and Democracy

It may be considered a mad enough exercise to attempt to rescue the word “anarchy” – however, to smear the word “democracy” seems almost beyond folly. Fewer words have received more reverence in the modern Western world. Democracy is in its essence the idea that we all run society. We choose individuals to represent our wishes, and the majority then gets to impose its wishes upon everyone else, subject ideally to the limitations of certain basic inalienable rights.

The irrational aspect of this is very hard to see, because of the endless amount of propaganda that supports democracy (though only in democracies, which is telling), but it is impossible to ignore once it becomes evident.

Democracy is based on the idea that the majority possesses sufficient wisdom to both know how society should be run, and to stay within the bounds of basic moral rules. The voters are considered to be generally able to judge the economic, foreign policy, educational, charitable, monetary, health care, military et al policies proposed by politicians. These voters then wisely choose between this buffet of various policy proposals, and the majority chooses wisely enough that whatever is then enacted is in fact a wise policy – and their chosen leader then actually enacts what he or she promised in advance, and the leader’s buffet of proposals is entirely wise, and no part of it requires moral compromise. Also, the majority is virtuous enough to respect the rights of the minority, even though they dominate them politically. Few of us would support the idea of a democracy where the majority could vote to put the minority to death, say, or steal all their property.

In addition, for even the idea of a democracy to work, the minority must be considered wise and virtuous enough to accept the decisions of the majority.

In short, democracy is predicated on the premises that:

A.    The majority of voters are wise and virtuous enough to judge an incredibly wide variety of complex proposals by politicians.

B.    The majority of voters are wise and virtuous enough to refrain from the desire to impose their will arbitrarily upon the minority,
but instead will respect certain universal moral ideals.

C.       The minority of voters who are overruled by the majority are wise and virtuous enough to accept being overruled, 
and will patiently await the next election in order to try to have their say once more, and will abide by the universal moral ideals of the society.

This, of course, is a complete contradiction. If society is so stuffed to the gills with wise, brilliant, virtuous and patient souls, who all respect universal moral ideals and are willing to put aside their own particular preferences for the sake of the common good, what on earth do we need a government for?

Whenever this question is raised, the shining image of the “noble citizenry” mysteriously vanishes, and all sorts of specters are raised in their place. “Well, without a government, everyone would be at each other’s throats, there would be no roads, the poor would be uneducated, the old and sick would die in the streets etc. etc. etc.”

This is a blatant and massive contradiction, and it is highly informative that it is nowhere part of anyone’s discourse in the modern world.

Democracy is valid because just about everyone is wise and moral, we are told. When we accept this, and question the need for a government, the story suddenly reverses, and we are told that we need a government because just about everyone is amoral and selfish.

Do you see how we have an ambivalent relationship not just with anarchism, but with democracy itself?

In the same way, whenever an anarchist talks about a stateless society, he is immediately expected to produce evidence that every single poor person in the future will be well taken care of by voluntary charity.

Again, this involves a rank contradiction, which involves democracy.

The welfare state, old-age pensions, and “free” education for the poor are all considered in a democracy to be valid reflections of the virtuous will of the people – these government programs were offered up by politicians, and voluntarily accepted by the majority who voted for them, and also voluntarily accepted by the minority who have agreed to obey the will of the majority!

In other words, the majority of society is perfectly willing to give up an enormous chunk of its income in order to help the sick, the old and the poor – and we know this because those programs were voted for and created by democratic governments!

Ah, says the anarchist, then we already know that the majority of people will be perfectly willing to help the sick, the old and the poor in a stateless society – democracy provides empirical and incontrovertible evidence of this simple fact!

Again, when this basic argument is put forward, the myth of the noble citizenry evaporates once more!

“Oh no, without the government forcing people to be charitable, no one would lift a finger to help the poor, people are so selfish, they don’t care etc. etc. etc.”

This paradox cannot be unraveled this side of insanity. If a democratic government must force a selfish and unwilling populace to help the poor, then government programs do not reflect the will of the people, and democracy is a lie, and we must get rid of it – or at least stop pretending to vote.

If democracy is not a lie, then existing government programs accurately represent the will of the majority, and thus the poor, the sick and the old will have nothing to fear from a stateless society – and will, for many reasons, be far better taken care of by private charity than government programs.

Now it is certainly easy to just shrug off the contradictions above and it say that somewhere, somehow, there just must be a good answer to these objections.

Although this can be a pleasant thing to do in the short run, it is not something I have ever had much luck doing in the long term. These contradictions come back and nag at me – and I am actually very glad that they have done so, since I think that the progress of human thought utterly depends upon us taking nothing for granted.

The first virtue is always honesty, and we should be honest enough to admit when we do not have reasonable answers to these reasonable objections. This does not mean that we must immediately come up with new “answers,” but rather just sit with the questions for a while, ponder them, look for weaknesses or contradictions in our objections – and only when we are satisfied that the objections are valid should we begin looking for rational and empirical answers to even some of the oldest and most commonly-accepted “solutions.”

This process of ceasing to believe in non-answers is fundamental to science, to philosophy – and is the first step towards anarchism, or the acceptance that violence is never a valid solution to non-violent problems.

Anarchy and Violence

One of the truly tragic misunderstandings about anarchism is the degree to which anarchism is associated with violence.

Violence, as commonly defined, is the initiation of the use of force. (The word “initiation” is required to differentiate the category of self-defense.)

Since the word “ambivalent” seems to be the theme for this book, it is important to understand that those who advocate or support the existence of a government have themselves a highly ambivalent relationship to violence.

To understand what I mean by this, it is first essential to recognize that taxation – the foundation of any statist system – falls entirely under the category of “the initiation of the use of force.”

Governments claim the right to tax citizens – which is, when you look at it empirically, one group of individuals claiming the moral right to initiate the use of force against other individuals.

Now, you may believe for all the reasons in the world that this is justified, moral, essential, practical and so on – but all this really means is that you have an ambivalent relationship to the use of force. On the one hand, you doubtless condemn as vile the initiation of the use of force in terms of common theft, assault, murder, rape and so on.

Indeed, it is the addition of violence that makes specific acts evil rather than neutral, or good. Sex plus violence equals rape. Property transfer plus violence equals theft. Remove violence from property transfer, and you have trade, or charity, or borrowing, or inheritance.

 However, when it comes to the use of violence to transfer property from “citizens” to “government,” these moral rules are not just neutralized, but actively reversed.

We view it as a moral good to resist a crime if possible – not an absolute necessity, but certainly a forgivable if not laudable action. However, to resist the forcible extraction of your property by the government is considered ignoble, and wrong.

Please note that I am not attempting to convince you of the anarchist position in this (or any other) section of this book. I consider it far too immense a task to change your mind about this in such a short work – and besides, if you are troubled by logical contradictions, I might rob you of the considerable intellectual thrill and excitement of exploring these ideas for yourself.

Thus in a democracy, we have a highly ambivalent relationship to violence itself. We both fear and hate violence when it is enacted by private citizens in pursuit of personal – and generally considered negative – goals. However, we praise violence when it is enacted by public citizens in pursuit of collective – and generally considered positive – goals.

For instance, if a poor man robs a richer man at gunpoint, we may feel a certain sympathy for the desperation of the act, but still we will pursue legal sanctions against the mugger. We recognize that relative poverty is no excuse for robbery, both due to the intrinsic immorality of theft, and also because if we allow the poor to rob the less poor, we generally feel that social breakdown would be the inevitable result. The work ethic of the poor would be diminished – as would that of the less poor, and society would in general dissolve into warring factions, to the economic and social detriment of all.

However, when we institutionalize this very same principle in the form of the welfare state, it is considered to be a noble and virtuous good to use force to take money from the more wealthy, and hand it over to the less wealthy.

Again, this book is not designed to be any sort of airtight argument against the welfare state – rather, it is designed to highlight the enormous moral contradictions in – and our fundamental ambivalence towards – the use of violence to achieve preferred ends.

Anarchy and War

I may have been doomed to this particular perspective from a very early age. I grew up in England in the 1970s, when the shadow cast by the Second World War still fell long across the mental landscape. I read war comics, saw war movies, heard details of epic battles, and sat silent during rather uncomfortable family gatherings where the British on my father’s side attempted to make small talk with the Germans on my mother’s.

I could not help but think, even when I was six or seven years old, that should my paternal uncle leap across the table and strangle my maternal uncle, this would be viewed as an immoral horror by everyone involved, and he would doubtless go to jail, probably for the rest of his life.

On the other hand, should they be placed in costume, and arrayed across a battlefield according to the whims of other men in costume, such a murder would be hailed as a noble sacrifice, and medals may be passed out, and pensions provided, and tickertape parades possibly ensue.

Thus, even in those long-ago days of soft white tablecloths and gently clinking cutlery, I mentally chewed on the problem that murder equals evil, and also that murder equals good. Murder equals jail, and murder equals medals.

When I was a little older, after “The Godfather” came out, endless slews of gangster movies sprayed their red gore across the silver screens. In these stories, certain tribal “virtues” such as loyalty, dedication and obeying orders, were portrayed as relatively noble, even as these butchers plied their bloody trade in slow motion, generally to the strains of classical music, and came to grimly spattered ends on bare concrete.

This paradox, too, stayed with me: “Murdering a man because another man orders you to – and pays you to – is a vile and irredeemable evil.”

Then, of course, another war movie would come out, with the exact opposite moral message: “Murdering a man because another man orders you to – and pays you to – is a virtuous and courageous good.”

I do remember bringing these contradictions up from time to time with the adults around me, only to be met with condescending irritation, often followed by a demand as to whether I would in fact prefer to be speaking German at present.

As I got older, and learned a little more about the world, these contradictions did not exactly resolve themselves, but rather were added to incessantly. We fought the Second World War to oppose National Socialism, I was told, as I munched on awful soy burgers, shivered in the cold and was told I could not bathe because the nationalized state unions were crippling the British economy.

I was told that I had to be terribly afraid of the selfish impulses of my fellow citizens – and also that I had to respect their wisdom when they chose a leader. I was told that the purpose of my education was to allow me to think for myself, but when I made decisions that those in authority disagreed with, I was scorned and humiliated, and my reasoning was never examined.

I was told that I should not use violence to solve my problems, but when I climbed a wall that apparently I was not supposed to, I was taken to the Headmaster’s office, where he assaulted me with a cane.

I was told that the British people were the wisest, most courageous and most virtuous group on the planet – and also that I was not to disobey those in authority.

When I was taught mathematics and science, I was punished for thinking irrationally – and then, when I asked sensible questions about the existence of God, I was punished for attempting to think rationally.

I was mocked as cowardly whenever I succumbed to peer pressure – and also mocked for my lack of interest in cheering our local sports team.

When I proposed thoughts that those in authority disagreed with, they demanded that I provide evidence; when I asked that they provide evidence for their beliefs, I was punished for insubordination.

This is nothing peculiar to me – all children go through these sorts of mental meat grinders – but I could not help but think, as I grew up, that what passed for “thinking” in society was more or less an endless series of manipulations designed to serve those in power.

What troubled me most emotionally was not the nonsense and contradictions that surrounded me, but rather the indisputable fact that they seemed completely invisible to everyone. Well, that’s not quite true. It is more accurate to say that these contradictions were visible exactly to the degree that they were avoided. Everyone walked through a minefield, claiming that it was not a minefield, but unerringly avoiding the mines nonetheless.

It became very clear to me quite quickly that I lived in a kind of negative intellectual and moral universe. The ethical questions most worth examining were those that were the most mocked, derided and attacked. What was virtuous was so often what was considered the most vile – and what was the most vile was often considered the most virtuous.

When I was 11, I went to the Ontario Science Center, which had an interesting and challenging exhibit where you attempted to trace the outline of a star by looking in a mirror. I have always remembered this exhibit, and just now I realize why – because this was my direct experience when attempting to map the ethics and virtues proclaimed by those around me – particularly those in authority.

Nowhere were these contradictions more pronounced than in the question of war.

It took me quite a long time to realize this, because the spectacle, fire and blood of war is so distracting, but the true violence of war does not occur on the battlefield, but in the homeland.

The carnage of conflict is only an effect of the core violence which supports war, which is the military enslavement of domestic citizens through the draft – and even more importantly, the direct theft of their money which pays for the war.

Without the money to fund a war – and pay the soldiers, whether they are drafted or not – war is impossible. The actual violence of the battlefield is a mere effect of the threatened violence at home. If citizens could not be forced to pay for the war – either in the present in the form of taxes, or in the future through deficit financing – then the carnage of the battlefield could never possibly occur.

I have read many books and articles on the root of war – whether it is nationalism, economic forces, faulty philosophical premises, class conflict and so on – none of which addressed the central issue, which is how war is paid for. This is like advancing merely psychological explanations as to why people play the lottery, without ever once mentioning their interest in the prize money. Why do people become doctors? Is it because they have a psychological need to present themselves as godlike healers, or because they are pleasing their mother and father, or because they are themselves secretly wounded, or because they possess an altruistic desire to heal the sick? These may be all interesting theories to pursue, but they are mere effects of the basic fact that doctors are highly paid for what they do.

Certainly psychological or sociological theories may explain why a particular person chooses to become a doctor rather than pursue some other high-paying occupation – but surely we should at least start with the fact that if doctors were not paid, almost no one would become a doctor. For instance, if a magic pill were invented tomorrow that ensured perfect health forever, there would be no more doctors – because no one would pay for the unnecessary service. Thus the first cause of doctors is – payment.

In the same way, we can endlessly theorize about the psychological, sociological or economic causes of war, but if we never talk about the simple fact that the first cause of war is domestic theft and military enslavement, then everything that follows remains mere abstract and airless intellectual quibbling, more designed to hide the truth than reveal it.

We can only point guns at foreign enemies because we first point guns at domestic citizens.

Without taxation, there can be no war.

Without governments, there can be no taxation.

Thus governments are the first cause of war.

The truth of the matter, I believe, is that deep down we know that if we pull out this one single thread – that coercion against citizens is the root of war – we know that many other threads will also come unraveled.

If we recognize the violence that is at the root of war – domestic violence, not foreign violence – then we stare at the core and ugly truth at the root of our society, and most of our collective moral aspirations.

The core and ugly truth at the root of our society is that we really, really like using violence to get things done. In fact, it is more than a mere aesthetic or personal preference – we define the use of violence as a moral necessity within our society.

How should we educate children? Why, we must force their parents – and everyone else – to pay for their education at gunpoint!

How should we help the poor? Why, we must force others in society to pay for their support at gunpoint!

How should we heal the sick? Why, we must force everyone to pay for their medical care at gunpoint!

Now, it may be the case that we have exhausted all other possibilities and ways of dealing with these complex and challenging problems, and that we have been forced to fall back on coercion, punishment and control as regretful necessities, and we are constantly looking for ways to reduce the use of violence in our solutions for these problems.

However, that is not the case, either empirically or rationally.

The education of poor children, the succor of the impoverished and the healing of the sick all occurred through private charities and voluntary associations long before statist agencies displaced them. This is exactly what you would expect, given the general modern support for these state programs, because everyone is so concerned with these genuinely needy groups.

Where violence is considered to be a regrettable but necessary solution to a problem, those in authority do not shy away from talking openly about it. When I was a child in England in the 1970s, I was repeatedly told with pride by my elders about their courageous use of violence against the Axis powers in World War II. No one tried to give me the impression that the Nazis were defeated by cunning negotiation and psychological tricks. The endless slaughterhouses of both the First and Second World Wars were not kept hidden from me, but rather the violence was praised as a regrettable but moral necessity.

American children are told about the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima – the slaughter and radiation poisoning of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians is not kept a secret; it is not bypassed, ignored or repressed in the telling of the tale.

Even when the war in question was itself questionable, such as the war in Vietnam, no one shies away from the true nature of the conflict, which was endless genocidal murder.

I do not for a moment believe that all of these genocides and slaughters were morally justifiable – or even practically required – but mine is certainly a minority opinion, and since the majority believes that these murders were both morally justified and practically required, they feel fully comfortable openly discussing the violence that they consider unavoidable.

However, this is not the case when we talk about statist solutions to the problems of charity and ill health. You could spend an entire academic career in these fields, and read endless books and articles on the subject, and never once come across any reference to the fact that these solutions are funded through violence. Just so you can understand how strange this really is, imagine spending 40 years as a professional war historian, and never once coming across the idea that war involves violence. Would we not consider that a rather egregious evasion of a rather basic fact?

This is a rather volatile comparison I know, but we saw the same phenomenon occurring in Soviet Russia. Almost no reference was made to the gulags in official state literature, particularly that literature intended to be consumed overseas. The tens of millions of concentration camp inmates showed up nowhere in the general or academic narrative of the Soviet Union – when the book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” finally appeared, even this relatively mild account of a day in the life of a prison camp inmate was greeted with shock, derision, horror and rage by those charged with defending that narrative.

It cannot really be the case that when society is genuinely proud of something, the truth is kept mysteriously hidden from view. Can we imagine fans of the New York Yankees actively working to repress the fact that their team won the World Series? Can we imagine the Communist leaders of China suppressing news that their athletes had won gold medals in the Olympics? Can we imagine a police department feverishly working to censor the facts about a large reduction in the crime rate?

Of course not. Where we are genuinely proud of an achievement, we do not refrain from talking about its causes. An Olympic athlete will speak with pride about the years of endless dawn training sessions; a successful entrepreneur will not hide the decades of hard work it took to succeed; a woman who has successfully struggled to lose weight is unlikely to wear a fat suit when she goes to her high school reunion.

However, when a core reality conflicts with a mythological narrative, academics, intellectuals and other cultural leaders are well-compensated for their ability to completely ignore that core reality – and usually savagely attack and mock anyone who brings it up.

Anarchy and Protection

One core reality that anarchists focus on – which surely is at least worthy of discussion – is that governments claim to serve and protect their citizens. When I was a child, and questioned the ethics of World War II, I was asked if I would prefer to be speaking German. In other words, the brave men and women of the Allied forces spent their lives and blood defending me from foreign marauders who would have enslaved me. This approach reinforces the basic story that the government was trying to protect its citizens.

In the same way, when I question the use of violence in the supplying of education, people always tell me that in the absence of that violence – even if they admit to its existence – the poor would remain uneducated. This approach reinforces the basic story that the purpose of state violence in this realm is to educate the children.

You can see the same pattern just about everywhere else. When I talk about the violence of the war on drugs, I am told that without such a war, society would degenerate into nihilistic addiction and violence – thus the purpose of the war on drugs is to keep people off drugs, and their neighbours safe from violence. When I talk about the base and coercive predation of Social Security, I am told that without it, the old would starve in the streets – thus reinforcing the narrative that the purpose of Social Security is to provide an income for the old, without which they would starve.

When we examine the narrative that the state exists to protect its citizens, we can clearly see that if we unearth the basic reality of the violence of taxation, a malevolent contradiction emerges.

It is very hard for me to tell you that I am only interested in protecting you, if I attack you first. If I roll up to you in a black van, jam a hood over your head, throw you in the back of my van, tie you up and toss you in my basement, would you reasonably accept as my explanation for this savagery that I only wished to keep you from harm?

Surely you would reply that if I was really interested in keeping you from harm, why on earth would I kidnap you and lock you up in a little room? Surely, if I initiate the use of force against you, it is somewhat irrational (to say the least) for me to tell you that I am only acting to protect you from the use of force.

This is a central reason why the aggression that governments initiate against their own citizens in order to extract the cash and cannon fodder for war is never talked about. It is hard to sustain the thesis that governments exist to protect their citizens if the first threat to citizens is always their own government.

If I have to rob you in order to pay for “protecting” your property from theft, at the very least I have created an insurmountable logical contradiction, if not a highly ambivalent moral situation.

In general, where coercion is a regrettable but necessary means of achieving a moral good, that coercion is not hidden from general view. In police dramas, the violence of the cops is not hidden. In war movies, shells, bullets and limbs fly across the screen with wanton abandon.

However, the coercion at the root of war and state social programs remains forever unspoken, unacknowledged, repressed, hidden from view; it is mad, shameful and imprudent to speak of it.

A hunter who proudly displays a dead deer on the hood of his car, and puts the antlers up in his basement, and barbecues the venison for his friends, can be considered somewhat proud – or at least not ashamed – of his hobby.

A hunter who uses a silencer, shoots a deer in the middle of the night, and carefully buries the body, leaving no trace, cannot be considered at all proud – and is in fact utterly ashamed – of his hobby.

Thus, when an anarchist looks at society, he sees a desperate shame regarding the use of violence to achieve social ends such as the military, health care, and education. Any anarchist who has even a passing interest in psychology – and I certainly put myself in this category – understands that this kind of unspoken shame is utterly toxic, both to an individual and to a society.

Thus it inevitably falls to anarchists to perform the unpleasant task of digging up the “body in the backyard,” or pointing out the widespread, prevalent and ever-increasing use of violence to achieve moral goals within society. “Is this right?” asks the anarchist – fully aware of the hostile and resentful glances he receives from those around him. “How can violence be both the greatest evil and the greatest good?” “If the violence that we use to achieve our supposedly moral ends is in fact justified and good, why is it that we are so ashamed to speak of it?”

To be an anarchist, to say the very least, requires a strong hide when it comes to social hostility and disapproval.

When people have genuinely exhausted all other possibilities, they tend not to be ashamed of their eventual solution. Even if we take the surface narrative of the Second World War at face value, the victors were able to express just pride because the narrative included the significant caveat that there was no other possible response to the aggression of the German, Italian and Japanese fascists.

Parents tend to be pretty open about hitting their children if they genuinely believe that no rational or moral alternatives exist to the use of violence. If hitting a child is the only way to teach her to be a good, productive and rational adult, then not hitting her is obviously a form of lax parenting, if not outright abuse. Hitting your daughter thus becomes a form of moral responsibility, and thus a positive good, much like yanking her back from running into traffic and ensuring that she eats her vegetables.

Such a parent, of course, reacts with outrage and indignation if you suggest to him that there are more productive alternatives to violence when it comes to raising children – for the obvious reason that if those alternatives exist, his violence turns from a positive good to a moral evil.

This is the situation that an anarchist faces when he talks about nonviolent alternatives to existing coercive “solutions.” If there is a nonviolent way to help the poor, heal the sick, educate the children, protect property, build roads, defend a geographical area, mediate disputes, punish criminals and so on – then the state turns from a regretfully necessary institution to an outright criminal monopoly.

This is a rather large and jagged pill for people to swallow, for any number of psychological, personal, professional and philosophical reasons.

Anarchy and Morality

Another paradox that anarchy brings into uncomfortable view is the contradiction between coercion and morality.

We all in general recognize and accept the principle that where there is no choice, there can be no morality. If a man is told to commit some evil while he has a gun pressed to his head, we would have a hard time categorizing him as evil – particularly compared to the man who is pressing the gun to his head.

If we accept the Aristotelian view that the purpose of life is happiness, and we accept the Socratic view that virtue brings happiness, then when we deny choice to people, we deny them the capacity for virtue, and thus for happiness.

There is great pleasure in helping others – I would certainly argue that it is one of the greatest pleasures, outside of love itself, which encompasses it. Helping others, though, is a highly complex business, which requires detailed personal attention, rigorous standards, a combination of encouragement, sternness, enthusiasm, sympathy and discipline – to name just a few!

Using coercion to drive charity is like using kidnapping to create love. Not only does the use of coercion through state programs deny choice to those wishing to help the poor – and thus the joy of achievement, and the motivation of happiness – but it corrupts and destroys the complex interchange required to elevate a human soul from its meager surroundings and its own low expectations.

If we believe that violence is a valid way to achieve moral ends – of helping the poor for instance – then there are two other approaches which would be far more logically consistent than the forced theft and transfer of taxation.

If violence is the only valid way to create economic “equality,” then surely it would make far more sense to simply allow those below a certain level of income to steal the difference from others. If we understand that state welfare agencies skim an enormous amount of money off the top – they represent a truly savage expense – then we can easily eliminate this overhead, and have a far more rational system besides, simply by eliminating the middleman and allowing the poor to steal from the middle and upper classes.

If the prospect of this solution fills you with horror, that is important to understand. If you feel that this proposal would degenerate into armed gangs of the poor rampaging through wealthier neighborhoods, then you are really saying that the poor are poor because they lack restraint and judgment, and will pillage others and undermine the economic success and general security of society in order to satisfy their own immediate appetites, without thought for the future.

If this is the case – if the poor really are such a shortsighted and savage band – then it is clear that they do not have the judgment and self-control to vote in democratic elections – which are essentially about the forcible transfer of income. If the poor only care about satisfying their immediate appetites, without a care for the long term, then they should not be at all involved in the coercive redistribution of wealth in society as a whole.

Ah, but what if taking the right to vote away from the poor fills you with outrage? Very well, then we can assume that the poor are rational, and able and willing to defer gratification. If a man is wise enough to vote on the use of force, then he is certainly wise enough to use that force himself.

Indeed, the barriers to using force personally are far higher than voting for the use of force in a democratic system. If you have to pick up a gun and go and collect your just property from richer people, that is quite a high “barrier to entry.” If, on the other hand, you simply have to scribble on the ballot once every few years, and then sit back and wait for your check to arrive, surely that will drive the escalation of violence in society far more rapidly.

If you still feel that this solution would be disastrous, because the poor would act with bad judgment, then you face a related issue, which is the quality of the education that the poor have received.

Anarchy and Education

If the poor lack wisdom, knowledge and good judgment, but they have been educated by the government for almost 15 years straight, then surely if we believe that the poor can be educated, we must then blame the government for failing to educate them. Since the poor cannot afford private schools, they must surrender their children to government schools, which have a complete and coercive monopoly over their education.

Now, either the poor have the capacity for wisdom and efficacy, or they do not. If the poor do have the capacity for wisdom, then the government is fully culpable for failing to cultivate it through education. If the poor do not have the capacity for wisdom, then the government is fully culpable for wasting massive resources in a futile attempt to educate them – and also, they cannot justly be allowed to vote.

Again, although I know that this must be uncomfortable or annoying to read through, I am willing myself to refrain from providing the clear and moral anarchistic solutions to these seemingly intractable problems. There is no point trying to give society a pill if society does not even think that it is sick. If your appendix is inflamed, and I offer to remove it for you, you will doubtless cry out your gratitude – if I run up to you on the street, however, and offer to remove an appendage that you believe to be both necessary and healthy, you would be highly inclined to charge me with assault.

Given that anarchism represents a near complete break with political society – although, as described above, a highly moral and rational expansion of personal society – it remains in no way attractive if nothing is seen to be particularly wrong with political society.

Churchill once famously remarked: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Anarchists believe this to be true, but would add that no form of government is better than no government at all!

This is not to say that democracy is not a better form of government than tyranny. It certainly is – my problem is that we have in the West achieved democracy over the past few hundred years, and now seem to be eternally content to rest on our laurels, so to speak.

I spent almost 15 years as a software entrepreneur, which may have colored my perspective on this issue to some degree. The software field reinvents itself almost from the ground up every year or two, it seems, which demands a constant commitment to dynamism, continual learning, and the abandonment of prior conceptions. The swift currents of perpetual change quickly sweep the inert away.

Thus I fully appreciate the significant step forward represented by democracy – but the mere fact that a thing is “better” in no way indicates that it is “best.”

When medieval surgeons realized that a patient had a better chance of surviving gangrene if they hacked off a limb, this could surely be called a better solution – but it could scarcely be called the best possible solution. Recognizing that prevention is always better than a cure does not mean that all cures are equally good.

I have no doubt whatsoever that the first caveman to figure out how to start a fire shared his knowledge with his tribe, and they all sat in a cave, with their feet pointed towards the flickering flames, warm in the midst of a winter chill for the first time, and grunted at each other: “Well, it can’t possibly get any better than this!”

No doubt when, a thousand years later, someone figured out that it was easier to capture and domesticate a cow rather than to continually hunt game, everyone sat back in front of their fire, their bellies full of milk, and grunted at each other: “Well, it can’t possibly get any better than this!”

These things are genuine improvements, to be sure, and we should not ever fail to appreciate the progress that we make – but neither should we automatically and endlessly assume that every step forward is the final and most perfect step, and that nothing can ever conceivably be improved in the future.

Democracy is considered to be superior to tyranny – and rightly so I believe – because to some degree it imitates the feedback mechanisms of the free market. Politicians, it is said, must provide goods and services to citizens, who provide feedback through voting.

It would seem to be logical to continue to extend that which makes democracy work further and further. If I find that, as a doctor, I infect fewer of my patients when I wash one little finger, then surely it would make sense to start washing other parts of my hand as well.

Really, this is what my approach to anarchism is fundamentally about. If voluntarism and feedback – a quasi-“market” – is what makes democracy superior, then surely we should work as hard as possible to extend voluntarism and feedback – particularly since we have the example of real markets, which work spectacularly well.

Anarchy and Reform

There is a great fear among people – or a great desire, to be more accurate – with regards to abandoning this system, when the perception exists that it can be reformed instead.

Democracy is messy, it is said – politicians pander to special interests, court voters with “free” goodies, manipulate the currency to avoid directly increasing taxes, create endless and intractable problems in the realms of education, welfare, incarceration and so on – but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater! If you have good ideas for improving the system, you should get involved, not sit back in your armchair and criticize everything in sight! One of the rare privileges of a living in a democracy is that anyone can get involved in the political process, from running for a local school board to prime minister or president of the entire country! Letter-writing campaigns, grassroots activism, blogs, associations, clubs – you name it, there are countless ways to get involved in the political process.

Given the degree of feedback available to the average citizen of a democracy, it makes little sense to agitate for changing the system as a whole. Since the system is so flexible and responsive, it is impossible to imagine that it can be replaced with any system that is more flexible – thus the practical ideal for anyone interested in social change is to bring his ideas to the “marketplace” of democracy, see who he can get on board, and implement his vision within the system – peacefully, politically, democratically.

This is a truly wonderful fairy tale, which has only the slight disadvantage of having nothing to do with democracy whatsoever.

When we think of a truly free market – otherwise known as the “free market” – we understand that we do not have to work for years and years, and give up thousands of hours and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, to satisfy our wishes. If I want to shop for vegetarian food, say, I do not have to spend years lobbying the local supermarket, or joining some sort of somewhat ineffective advisory Board, and pounding lawn signs, and writing letters, and cajoling everyone in the neighborhood – all I have to do is go and buy some vegetarian food, locally or over the Internet if I prefer.

If I want to date a particular woman, I do not have to lobby everyone in a 10 block radius, get them to sign a petition, make stirring speeches about my worthiness as a boyfriend, devote years of my life attempting to get collective approval for asking her out. All I have to do is walk up to her, ask her out and see if she says “yes.”

If I want to be a doctor, I do not have to spend years lobbying every doctor in the country to get a majority approval for my application. Neither do I have to pursue this process when I want to move, drive a car, buy a book, plan for my retirement, change countries, learn a language, buy a computer, choose to have a child, go on a diet, start an exercise program, go into therapy, give to a charity and so on.

Thus it is clear that individuals are “allowed” to make major and essential life decisions without consulting the majority. The vast majority of our lives is explicitly anti-democratic, insofar as we vehemently reserve the right to make our own decisions – and our own mistakes – without subjecting them to the scrutiny and authority of others. Why is it that we are “allowed” to choose who to marry, whether to have children, and how to raise them – but we are violently not allowed to openly choose where they go to school? Why is every decision that leads up to the decision of how to educate a child is completely free, personal, and anti-democratic – but the moment that the child needs an education, a completely opposite methodology is enforced upon the family? Why is the free anarchy of personal decisions – in direct opposition to coercive authority – such a moral imperative for every decision which leads up to the need for a child’s education – but then, free anarchic choice becomes the greatest imaginable evil, and coercive authority must be substituted in its place?

There is a particularly cynical side of me – which is not to say that the cynicism is necessarily misplaced – which would argue that the reason that there is no direct interference in having children is because that way people will have more kids, which the state needs to grow into taxpayers, in the same way that a dairy farmer needs his cows to breed. Those who profit from political power always need new taxpayers, but they certainly do not want independently critical and rational taxpayers, since that is fundamentally the opposite of being a taxpayer. Thus they do not interfere with having children, only with the education of children – just as a goose farmer will not interfere with egg laying, but will certainly clip the wings of any geese he wishes to keep alive and profit from.

Anarchy and Exceptions

At this point, you may be thinking that there are good reasons why political coercion is substituted for personal anarchy in particular situations. Perhaps there is some rule of thumb or principle which separates the two which, if it can be discovered, will lay this mystery bare.

If I break up with a girlfriend, for instance, I do not owe her anything legally. If I marry her, however, I do. When I take a new job, I may be subject to a probationary period of a few months, when I can be fired – or quit – with impunity. We can think of many examples of such situations – the major difference, however, is that these are all voluntary and contractual situations.

The justification for a government – particularly a democratic government – is really founded upon the idea of a “social contract.” Because we happen to be born in a particular geographical location, we “owe” the government our allegiance, time, energy and money for the rest of our lives, or as long as we stay. This “contract” is open to renegotiation, insofar as we can decide to alter the government by getting involved in the political process – or, we can leave the country, just as we can leave a marriage or place of employment. This argument – which goes back to Socrates – is based upon an implied contract that remains in force as long as we ourselves remain within the geographical area ruled over by the government.

However, this idea of the “social contract” fails such an elemental test that it is only testament to the power of propaganda that it has lasted as a credible narrative for over 2,000 years.

Children cannot enter into contracts – and adults cannot have contracts imposed upon them against their will. Thus being born in a particular location does not create any contract, since it takes a lunatic or a Catholic to believe that obligations accrue to a newborn squalling baby.

Thus children cannot be subjected to – or be responsible for – any form of implicit social contract.

Adults, on the other hand, must be able to choose which contracts they enter into – if they cannot, there is no differentiation between imposing a contract on a child, and imposing a contract on an adult. I cannot say that implicit contracts are invalid for children, but then they magically become automatically valid when the child turns 18, and bind the adult thereby.

It is important also to remember that there is fundamentally no such thing as “the state.” When you write a check to pay your taxes, it is made out to an abstract quasi-corporate entity, but it is cashed and spent by real life human beings. Thus the reality of the social contract is that it “rotates” between and among newly elected political leaders, as well as permanent civil servants, appointed judges, and the odd consultant or two. This coalescing kaleidoscope of people who cash your check and spend your money is really who you have your social contract with. (This can occur in the free market as well, of course – when you take out a loan to buy a house, your contract is with the bank, not your loan officer, and does not follow him when he changes jobs.)

However, to say that the same man can be bound by a unilaterally-imposed contract represented by an ever-shifting coalition of individuals, in a system that was set up hundreds of years before he was born, without his prior choice – since he did not choose where he was born – or explicit current approval, is a perfectly ludicrous statement.

We can generally accept as unjust any standard of justice that would disqualify itself. When we are shopping, we would scarcely call it a “sale” if prices had been jacked up 30%. We would not clip a “coupon” that added a dollar to the price of whatever we were buying – in fact, we would not call this a coupon at all!

If we examine the concept of the “social contract,” which is claimed as a core justification for the existence of a government, it is more than reasonable to ask whether the social contract would justly enforce the social contract itself! In other words, if the government is morally justified because of the ethical validity of an implicit and unilaterally imposed contract, will the government defend implicit and unilaterally imposed contracts? If I start up a car dealership and automatically “sell” a car to everyone in a 10 block radius, and then send them a bill for the car they have “bought” – and send them the car as well, and bind their children for eternity in such a deal as well – would the government enforce such a “contract”?

I think that we all know the answer to that question…

If I attempted to bring a social contract to an agency that claims as its justification the existence and validity of the exact same social contract, it would laugh in my face and call me insane.

Are you beginning to get a clear idea of the kind of moral and logical contradictions that a statist system is based upon?

Many times throughout human history, certain societies have come to the valid conclusion that an institution can no longer be reformed, but must instead be abolished. The most notable example is slavery, but we can think of others as well, such as the unity of church and state, oligarchical aristocracy, military dictatorships, human or animal sacrifices to the gods, rape as a valid spoil of war, torture, pedophilia, wife abuse and so on. This does not mean of course that all of these practices and institutions have faded from the world, but it does mean that in many civilized societies, the essential debate is over, and was not settled with the idea of “reforming” institutions such as slavery. The origin of the phrase “rule of thumb” came from an attempt to reform the beating of wives, and restrict it to beating your wife with a stick no wider than your thumb. This practice was not reformed, but rather abolished.

However well-intentioned these reforms may have been, we can at best only call them ethical in terms of halting steps towards the final goal, which is the elimination of the concept of wife beating as a moral norm at all. In the same way, some reformers attempted to get slave owners to beat their slaves less, or at least less severely, but with the hindsight of history and our further moral development, we can see that slavery was not fundamentally an institution that could ever be reformed, but rather had to be utterly abolished. We can find encouragement in such “reforms” only to the degree that they reduced suffering in the present, while hopefully spurring on the goal of abolishing slavery.

Any moralist who said that getting rid of slavery would be a criminal and moral disaster of the first order, but instead encouraged slaves to attempt to work within the system, or counseled slave owners to voluntarily take on the goal of treating their slaves with less brutality, could scarcely be called a moralist, at least by modern standards. Instead, we would term such a “reformer” as a very handy apologist for the existing brutality of the system. By pretending that the evils inherent in slavery could be mitigated or eliminated through voluntary internal reform, these “moralists” actually slowed or stalled the progress towards abolition in many areas. By holding out the false hope that an evil institution could be turned to goodness, these sophists blunted the power of the argument from morality, which is that slavery is an inherent evil, and thus cannot be reformed.

The finger-wagging admonition, “Rape more gently,” is oxymoronic. Rape is the opposite of gentle, the opposite of moral.

This is how many anarchists view the proposition that the existing system of political violence should be reformed somehow from within, rather than fundamentally opposed on moral terms, as an absolute evil, based on coercion and brutality, particularly towards children – with the inevitable consequence that its only salvation can come from being utterly abolished.

Anarchism and Political Realities

Along with the anarchistic moral arguments against the use of force to solve problems come many well-developed economic arguments against the long-term stability of any democratic political system.

To take just one example, let’s look at the problem of unequal incentives.

In the United States, thousands of sugar producers receive massive state subsidies and coercive protection from foreign competitors – benefits which have been in place, for the most part, since the close of the war of 1812. Although $1.2 billion was spent in 2005 subsidizing sugar production, the majority of the money goes to a few dozen growers.

These sugar subsidies cost the US economy billions of dollars annually, while netting major sugar producers millions of dollars a year each. The average American consumer would have to fight for years, spend untold hours and dollars attempting to overturn the subsidies in Congress – to save, what? A few dollars a year apiece? None but a lunatic would attempt it.

On the other hand, of course, these sugar growers will spend whatever time and money it takes to preserve their massive influx of cash. It is not that hard to figure out who will present stronger “incentives” – to say the least – to Congress. It is not that hard to figure out just who will donate as much as humanly possible to a Congressman’s run. It is embarrassingly easy to figure out who will keep calling the congressman at 2 a.m. with dire threats should he dare to question the value of the subsidies, and promises of money if he refrains.

Politicians, like so many of us, take the rational path of least resistance. A congressman will receive no thanks for killing these subsidies and returning a few unproven and ignored dollars to his average constituent’s pocket – such a “benefit” would scarcely even be noticed. However, the sugar growers would raise bloody hell to the very skies, as would all their employees, their hangers on, the professionals they employ, and anyone else who benefits from the concentration of illicit wealth that they enjoy.

Furthermore, should the subsidies be somehow cut, and the price of a candy bar dropped a nickel, all that would happen is that some other politician would impose a tax of, say, about a nickel on candy bars – to save the children’s teeth, of course – thus generating more cash for him to hand out and utterly nullifying any benefit to the consumer. Would any rational politician pursue a policy that would enrage his supporters, strengthen his enemies and win no new friends?

Of course not.

Thus it is clear to see that while no incentive exists to do the right thing, every conceivable incentive exists to do the wrong thing. In the case of sugar subsidies, the “sting” to the consumer is only a few dollars a year – multiply this, however, thousands and thousands of times over, for each special interest group, and we can see how the taxpayer will inevitably die a death not by beheading, but rather by the tiny bites of 10,000 mosquitoes, each feeding its young by feasting on a droplet of his blood.

No democratic government has ever survived without taking a monopoly control over the currency. The reason for this is simple – politicians need to buy votes, but that illusion is hard to sustain if those you give money to have to pay that money back within a few years in the form of higher taxes. Taxpayers would get wise to this sort of game very quickly, and so politicians need to find other ways to fog and befuddle taxpayers. Deficit financing is one way – give money to people in the present, then stick the bill to their children at some undefined point in the future, when you’re no longer around – perfect!

Another great way of pretending to give people money is to inflate their currency by printing more money. This way, you can give a man a hundred dollars today, and just reduce the purchasing power of his dollar by 5% next year by printing more. Not one person in a thousand will have any idea what’s really going on, and besides, you always have the business community to blame for “gouging” the consumer.

Another “solution” is to promise public-sector unions large increases in salary, which only really take effect toward the end of your office, so that the next administration gets stuck with the real bill. Also, you can sign perpetual contracts giving them plenty of medical and retirement benefits, the majority of which will only kick in when they get older, long after you are gone.

Alternatively, you can sell long-term bonds that give you the cash right now, while sticking future taxpayers in 10, 20 or 30 years with the bill for repaying your principle, and accumulated interest.

One other option is to start licensing everything in sight – building permits, hot dog stand permits, dog licenses and so on – thus grabbing a lot of cash up front, and leaving your successors to deal with the diminished tax base from lower economic activity in the future.

Or you can buy the votes of apartment-dwellers with “rent control” – leaving the next few administrations to deal with the inevitable resulting apartment shortage.

This list can go on and on – it is a list as old as the Roman and Greek democracies – but the essential point is that democracy is always and forever utterly unsustainable.

A basic fact of economics is that people respond to incentives – the incentives in any statist society – democratic, fascist, communist, socialist, you name it – are always so unbalanced as to turn the public treasury into a kind of blood mad shark-driven feeding frenzy.

Well, say the defenders of democracy, but the people can always choose to vote in other people who will fix the system!

One of the wonderful aspects of working from first principles, and taking our evidence from the real world, is that we don’t have to believe pious nonsense anymore. Except directly after significant wars, when they need to re-grow their decimated tax bases, democratic governments simply never ever get smaller.

The logic of this remains depressingly simple, and just as depressingly inevitable.

A central question that any voter who claims to wish to be informed must ask is: why is this man’s name on the ballot?

The standard answer is that he has a vision to fix the neighborhood, the city, or the country, and so he has nobly dedicated his life to public service, and needs your vote so that he can begin fixing the problem. He is a pragmatic idealist who knows that compromises must be made, but who can still make tangible improvements in your life.

Of course, this is all pure nonsense, as we can well see from the fact that things in a democracy always get worse, not better. Standards of living decline, national debt explodes, household debt increases, educational achievements plummet, poverty rates increase, incarceration rates increase, unfunded liabilities skyrocket – and yet, election after election, the sheep run to the polls and feverishly scribble their hopes on to the ballots, certain that this time, everything will turn around! (For those reading this in the future, we are currently right in the middle of “Obama-mania.”)

The question remains – why is this man on the ballot?

We all know that it takes an enormous amount of money and influence to run for any kind of substantial office. The central question is, then: why do people give money to a candidate?

I’m not talking about a national presidential campaign, where obviously people give a lot of money to the candidate in the hopes of giving him power to achieve some sort of shared goals and so on.

No, I mean: where does the money to get started even come from?

Why would pharmaceutical companies, aerospace companies, engineering companies, manufacturing companies, farmers, and public-sector unions and so on give money and support to a candidate?

Clearly, these groups are not handing out cash for purely idealistic reasons, since they are in the business of making money, at least for their members. Thus they must be giving money to potential candidates in return for political favors down the road – preferential treatment, tax breaks, tariff restrictions on competitors, government contracts etc.

In other words, any candidate that you get to vote for must have already been bought and paid for by others.

Does this sound like an odd and cynical assertion? Perhaps – but it is very easy to figure out if a candidate has been bought and paid for.

Candidates will always talk in stirring tones about “sacrifice” and so on, but you surely must have noticed by now that no candidate ever talks specifically about the spending that he is going to cut. You never hear him say that he is going to balance the budget by cutting the spending of X, Y or Z. Everything is either couched in abstract terms, or specific promises to specific groups. (At the moment, the current fetish – in leftist circles – is to pretend that 47 million Americans can get “free” healthcare if the government lowers the tax breaks on a few billionaires.)

In other words, if you don’t see anyone else’s head on the chopping block, that is because it is your head on the chopping block.

Of course, if the government really wanted to help the economy at the expense of some very rich people, it would simply annul the national debt – in effect, declare bankruptcy, and start all over again.

Why does it not do this? Why does it never even approach this topic? We have seen price controls on a variety of goods and services over the past few generations – why not simply place a moratorium on paying interest on the national debt, at least for the time being?

Well, the simple answer is that the government simply cannot survive without a constant infusion of loans, largely from foreign lenders.

This is a bit of a clue for you as to how important your vote really is, and how concerned your leaders are about your personal and particular issues – relative to, say, those of foreign lenders.

Ah, you might argue, but why would a pharmaceutical company, say, give money to a potential candidate, since no deal can possibly be put down in writing, and that potential candidate might well take the money, and then just not take the calls from that pharmaceutical company when he or she gets into power?

Well, this is a distinct possibility, of course, but it has a relatively simple solution.

When a candidate is interested in taking a run at any reasonably high office, he goes around to various places and asks for money.

When you ask someone for a few thousand dollars, naturally, his first question is going to be: “What are you going to do for me in return?”

Early on in any particular political race, there are quite a number of candidates. Anyone who wants to donate money to a political candidate in the hopes of gaining political favors down the road is only going to do so if he believes that the candidate will fulfill the unwritten obligation – the “anti-social contract,” if you like.

In politics, as in business, credibility is efficiency. Those who have built up reputations for keeping their promises end up being able to do business on a handshake, which keeps their costs down considerably. No new person entering a field will have the credibility or track record to be able to achieve this enviable efficiency, and so will have to earn it over the course of many years.

Thus we know for certain that when a company gives money to a political candidate, in the expectation of return favors in the future, that political candidate already has an excellent track record of doing just that. This kind of information will have been passed around certain communities – “Joe X is a man of his word!” – just as the reliability of a drug dealer and the quality of his product is passed around in certain other communities.

Thus we know that any candidate who receives significant funding from special interest groups is a man who has consistently proven his “integrity to corruptibility” in the past – for if he has no track record, or an inconsistent track record, no one will give him money to get started.

(Just as a side note, this is a very interesting example of exactly why anarchism will work – we do not need the state to enforce contracts, since the state itself functions on implicit contracts that can never be legally enforced.)

In other words, whenever you see a name on the ballot, you can be completely certain that that name represents a man who has already been bought and paid for over the course of many years, and that those who have paid for him do not have, let us say, your best interests at heart.

But we can go one step further.

Since all the money that moves around in a political system must come from somewhere – the millions of dollars that are given to the sugar farmers must come from taxpayers – we can be sure that just about every benefit that special interest groups seek to gain comes at your expense. Pharmaceutical companies want an extension on their patents so they can charge you more money. Domestic steel companies want to increase barriers against imported steel so they can charge you more money. If a government union wants additional benefits, that will cost you. If the police want to expand the war on drugs, that will cost you security, safety and money.

Whoever strives to benefit from the public purse has their hand groping towards your pocket.

Thus it is perfectly fair and reasonable to remind you that every name that you see on the ballot is diametrically opposed to your particular and personal interests, since they have been paid for by people who want to rob you blind.

Another aspect of “democricide” is the inevitable and constant escalation of public spending necessary to achieve or maintain political power.

Let us take the example of a mayor running for his second term. When he was running for his first term, sewage treatment workers donated $20,000 to his campaign, and in return he granted them a 10% raise. Now that he is running for his second term, and cannot give them another 10% raise, they have no reason to donate to his campaign. Thus he either has to offer the sewage treatment workers some other benefit, or he has to create some new program or benefit which he can dangle in front of some new group, in order to secure their donations. This is why political candidates always announce new spending when they throw their hats into the ring – the new spending is the rather unsubtle promise of benefits which will be granted to those who donate to his campaign. A new stadium, a new convention center, a new bridge, a new arts program, new housing projects, highway expansions and so on – all of these inevitably and permanently raise the “high water mark” of governmental spending, and are an absolute requirement of running for office.

Now, our aforementioned sewage treatment workers would of course prefer a permanent 10% raise rather than a one-time cash bonus. Thus they will always try to negotiate a permanent contract rather than continue to be at the mercy of the will and whim of their political masters.

As this process continues, the proportion of non-discretionary spending in any political budget grows and grows. This is another reason why new spending initiatives must always be created in order to secure new donations. Money cannot be shifted from one area to another, because it has permanently been earmarked for a particular group in return for a one-time political contribution in the past.

If the mayor who is running for his second term decides to attempt to roll back the 10% raise, in order to free up money which he can then offer to someone else in return for campaign contributions, he would be committing political suicide. He would be breaking a freely-signed contract, sticking it to the working man, and provoking a very smelly strike – but for his own particular self-interest, the effects would be even worse.

Remember, people will donate to a political campaign based on an implicit contract of future rewards from the public treasury. If a candidate attempts to “roll back” benefits that he has distributed previously in return for donations, not only will he incur the wrath of the existing special-interest group, but he will be revealed as a man who breaks his implicit and unenforceable “contracts.” Since this candidate can no longer be relied upon to give public money back to those who donate to his campaign, he will find that his campaign donations dry up almost immediately, and his political career comes to an abrupt end.

Of course, ex-politicians are highly prized as lobbyists as well, but if this mayor breaks faith with a donator, he will no longer be valuable in that capacity either, and will forego significant income in his post-political career.

Finally, any political candidate who has channeled public money to past donators faces the problem of blackmail. If he attempts to cross any of his prior supporters, mysterious leaks to the press will start to emerge, talking about the sleazy backroom deals that got him in power – thus also effectively ending his political career. All the other candidates will piously deride his cynical corruption, while of course making their own sleazy backroom deals in turn.

(It is highly instructive to note that two well-known fictional portrayals of the political campaign process – “The West Wing” and “The Wire” – repeatedly portray the candidate begging for money, but never once show why he receives it – the motives of his donors. The reason for this is simple: they wish to portray an idealistic politician, and so they cannot possibly reveal the reasons why people are giving him money. If the fictional story were to follow the inevitable “laws” of democracy, the storyline would be abruptly truncated, or the lead character would be revealed as far less sympathetic. The candidate would ask for money, and then the potential donor would indicate the favor he wanted in return. Then, the candidate would either refuse, thus ending his campaign for lack of funds – or he would agree, thus ending any real sympathy we have for him. This basic truth – like so many in a statist society – can never be discussed, even on a show like “The Wire,” which has little problem revealing corruption everywhere else. A policeman can be shown breaking a child’s fingers, but the true nature of the political process must be forever hidden…)

Thus we can see that – at least at the level of economics – democracy is a sort of slow-motion suicide, in which you are told that it is the highest civic virtue to approve of those who want to rob you.

I do not want this book to become a critique of democracy – but rather, as I have said before, my goal is simply to help you to understand the myriad contradictions involved in any logical or moral defense of a state-run society.

If you do not even know that society is sick, you will never be interested in a cure.

The Social Challenges of Anarchism

In the interests of efficiency – both yours and mine – I have decided to keep this book as short as possible. If I have not shown you at least some the logical and moral problems with our existing way of organizing society by now, I doubt that I shall ever be able to.

If we accept that perhaps some of the criticisms of statism presented in this little book are at least potentially somewhat valid, one essential question remains.

If you can easily understand the above simple and effective criticisms – compared to, say, the mathematics behind the theory of relativity – then the question must be asked:

“Why have you never heard of these criticisms?”

This question packs more of a punch than you may realize.

If I put forward the charge that our society is currently organized along the principles of violence, control and brutal punishment, but you have never heard this argument before, despite the eager talents of tens of thousands of well-paid intellectuals, professors, pundits, journalists, writers and so on, then there must be some reason – or series of reasons – why such a universal silence remains in place.

The standards of proof for startling new theories must be raised exactly to the degree that those new theories are easy to understand. New theories that are very hard to understand are easier to accept as potentially true, simply because of their difficulty. New theories that are very easy to understand, however, face a far higher hurdle, since they must explain why they have not been understood, discussed or disseminated before.

In this final section, I will talk about why I think anarchism is almost never openly discussed – and is in fact constantly scorned, feared and derided – and I will present what I think is an interesting paradox, which is that the degree to which anarchism remains undiscussed is exactly the degree to which anarchism will undoubtedly work.

Anarchism and Academia

Let’s have a look at academia, focusing on the Arts, where anarchism could be a potential topic – areas such as Political Science, Economics, History, Philosophy, Sociology etc.

It is true that a few intellectuals have had successful careers while expressing sympathy for anarchism – on the left, we have the example of Noam Chomsky; in the libertarian camp, we have the example of Murray Rothbard. However, the vast majority of academics simply roll their eyes if and when the subject of anarchism as a viable alternative to a violence-based society ever arises.

To understand this, the first thing that we need to recognize about academia is that, since it is highly subsidized by governments, demand vastly outstrips supply. In other words, there are far more people who want to become academics then there are jobs in academia.

Normally what would occur in this situation – were academia actually part of the free market – is that wages and perks would decline to the point where equilibrium would be reached.

At the moment, academics get several months off during the summer, do not labor under oppressive course loads, are virtually impossible to fire once they reach tenure, get to spend their days reading, writing and discussing ideas (which many of us would consider a hobby), travel with expenses paid to conferences, receive high levels of social respect, get paid sabbatical leaves, a full array of highly lucrative benefits, and can choose comfortable retirements or continued involvement in academia, as they see fit – and often make salaries in the six figures to boot!

Given the number of non-monetary benefits involved in being an academic, in a free market situation, wages would fall precipitously, or job requirements would rise. However, since academics – particularly in the US – basically work under the protection of a highly subsidized union, this does not occur.

Since the job itself is so innately desired by so many people, what results is a “sellers market,” in which dozens of qualified candidates jostle for each individual job. Like Angelina Jolie in a nightclub, those with the most to offer can be enormously picky.

Also, since academics cannot be fired, if a department head hires an unpleasant, troublesome, difficult or just unnerving person, he will have to live with that decision for the next 30-odd years. If divorce became impossible, people would be much more careful about choosing compatible spouses.

This is one simple and basic explanation for the exaggerated politeness and conviviality in the world of academia. People who are cantankerous, or who ask uncomfortable questions, or who reason from first principles and thus eliminate endless debating, or whose positions place into question the value and ethics of those around them, simply do not get hired.

In a free market situation, original and challenging thinking would be of great interest to students, who would doubtless pay a premium to be mentally stimulated in such a way. However, since the majority of funding in academia comes from governments, students have virtually no influence over the hiring of professors.

Let us imagine the progress of a wannabe anarchist graduate student.

In his undergraduate classes, he will annoy the professors and irritate his fellow students by asking uncomfortable questions that they cannot answer. If he talks about the violence that is at the root of state funding, he will also be open to the charge of rank hypocrisy – which I can assure you will be lavishly supplied – since he is accepting state money in the form of a subsidized university education.

His implicit criticism of his professors – that they are funded and secured through violence – will be highly annoying to them. Although this anarchist may grind his discontented way through an undergraduate degree, he will find it very hard to get any kinds of letters of reference from his professors to gain entrance into graduate school. If a professor talks about the applicant’s anarchism in his letter of recommendation, anyone evaluating such a letter will be utterly bewildered as to why such a recommendation is being made – thus devaluing any such letters from said professor in the future.

If the professor who recommends an anarchist finds that his future recommendations fall on more skeptical eyes, then the word will very quickly spread that taking this professor’s course, and getting a letter of recommendation from him, is the kiss of death for any academic aspirant.

Thus this professor will find enrollment in his courses mysteriously declining, which will not be helpful to his career, to say the least.

If the professor does not mention the grad student applicant’s anarchism, his fate becomes even worse, since even more time will be wasted interviewing an applicant that no one actually wants. Those on the receiving end of such a letter of recommendation will find it impossible to believe that the professor did not know that the student’s anarchism was a factor, and so will view his letter as a bizarre form of passive aggression, and will be that much less likely to view any future recommendations even remotely positively.

Thus an academic who writes a letter of recommendation for a student whose views will be disconcerting or discomfiting to others is undermining his value to his future students for no clear benefit whatsoever. We can safely assume that an academic who has reached the rank of professor – even prior to tenure – is not a man blind to his own long-term self-interest.

Even if this anarchist were to somehow get through to a Masters program, the same problems would exist, although they would be even worse than his undergraduate degree. Those who are in a Masters program – particularly in the Arts – are mostly there with the specific goal of securing a position in academia. In other words, they are not there for the relentless pursuit of inviolate truth, but rather to ingratiate themselves with their professors, do the kind of research that will get them noticed, and gain the kind of approval from those above them that will give them a boost up the next rung of the ladder.

Thus, when the anarchist begins talking about his theories, he will face either passive or aggressive hostility from those around him, who will view him as an irritating and counterproductive time-waster. Whether or not his theories are true is actually beside the point – the reality is that his theories actively interfere with the pursuit of academic success, which is why people are in the classroom in the first place.

Also, since the anarchist claims the power to see through the universal veneer of proclaimed self-interest to the core motivations beneath – yet does not see the core motivations of those around him in graduate school – he will also be seen to be obstinately blind. “You should believe the truth,” he will say, without seeing that these academic aspirants are not there for the truth, but rather to get a job in academia. In other words, he is avoiding the truth as much as they are.

Furthermore, by continually reminding people that the existing society in general – and academics in particular – is funded through violence, the anarchist is actively offending and insulting everyone around him. There are very few people who can absorb the moral charge of blindness to evil and corruption and come back with open-mindedness and curiosity.

If the anarchist is right, then the professors are corrupt, and the academic aspirants should really abandon their fields and go into the private sector, or become self-employed, or something along those lines. However, these people have already invested years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income in pursuit of a position in academia. They obviously do not want a position in the free market, since they are in a graduate arts degree program – and should they leave that program, a good portion of the entire value that they have accumulated will vanish.

We could examine this process for much longer, but let us end with this point.

Let us imagine that a tenured academic reads this book and agrees with at least the potential validity of some of the arguments it contains. He does not have to really worry about getting fired, so why would he not begin to raise these questions with his colleagues?

Well, because these views will discredit him with his colleagues, display what they would consider “poor judgment,” (and in some ways they would not be wrong!) and this would have a highly deleterious effect on his ability to get published, speak at conferences, attract students, and enjoy a convivial and collegial work environment with his peers.

He will thus harm his own pleasure, career and interests, without changing anyone’s mind about anarchism – so why would he pursue such a course?

When an environment is corrupt, rational self-interest is automatically and irredeemably corrupted as well. We can see this easily in the realm of politics, but it is harder to see in the realm of academia.

Before I started this section, I said that I would present an interesting paradox, which is that the degree to which anarchism remains undiscussed is exactly the degree to which anarchism will undoubtedly work.

Anarchism is fundamentally predicated on the basic reality that violence is not required to organize society. Violence in the form of self-defense is acceptable, of course, but the initiation of the use of force is not only morally evil, but counterproductive from a pragmatic standpoint as well.

Anarchism – at least as I approach it – is not a form of relentless pacifism which rejects any coercive responses to violence. My formulation of an anarchistic society is one which has perfectly powerful and capable mechanisms for dealing with violent crime, in the absence of a centralized group of criminals called the state. In fact, an anarchistic society will undoubtedly deal with the problems of violent crime in a far more proactive and beneficial manner than our existing systems, which in fact do far more to provoke violence and criminality than they do to reduce or oppose it.

Anarchists recognize the power of implicit and voluntary social contract, and the power of both positive incentives such as pay and career success, as well as negative incentives such as social disapproval, economic exclusion and outright ostracism.

Thus in a very interesting way, the more that anarchism is excluded from the social discourse, the greater belief anarchists can have in the practicality of their own solutions.

In the realm of academia, obviously there is no central coercive committee that will shoot or imprison anyone who brings up anarchism in a positive light – there is no “state” in the realm of the university, yet the “rules” are universally respected and enforced, spontaneously, without planning, without coordination – and without violence!

This irony becomes even greater in the realm of politics, where the implicit “contracts” of political backroom deals are universally enforced through a process of positive selection for corruption, in that those who do not “pay back” their contributors with public money are automatically excluded from the system.

Thus both academia and the state itself work on anarchistic principles, which is the spontaneous self-organization and enforcement of unwritten rules without relying on violence.

A truly stateless society, where such rules could be made explicit and openly contractual, would function even more effectively.

In other words, if anarchism were openly talked about in state-funded academia, it would be very likely that anarchism would never work in practice.

If the unenforceable corruption of democracy did not “work” so well, that would be a significant blow against the practical efficacy of anarchism.

Academics and Voluntarism

Academics face an enormous challenge – particularly in economics – which is the charge of rank hypocrisy.

Economists are nearly universal in their support for free trade, yet of course most economists work in state-funded or state-supported institutions such as universities, the World Bank, the IMF and so on – and in academia in particular, take shelter behind enormously high barriers to entry in the form of institutionalized protectionism, and shield themselves from market forces through tenure.

Economists have a number of sophisticated responses to the question why, if voluntarism and free markets are so good, do they specifically exclude themselves from the push and pull of the free market?

First of all, academics will argue, the truth of a proposition is not determined by the integrity of the proposer (if Hitler says that two plus two is four, we cannot reasonably oppose him by saying that he is evil). Secondly, many academics will say that they have merely inherited the system from prior academics, and that they held these free-market views before they achieved tenure. Thirdly, they can argue that they do face possible unemployment, however unlikely, should their department close, and so on.

These are all very interesting arguments, and are worthy of our attention I think, but are fundamentally irrelevant to the question of academia.

It is a common defense of hypocritical intellectuals to say that their arguments cannot be judged by their own contradictory behaviour, but must be viewed on their own merits – but this argument does become rather tiresome after a while.

To see what I mean, let us imagine a man named Bob who claims that his sole professional goal in life is motivating others to lose weight by following his diet. He continually proclaims that it is very important to be slim, and that only his diet will make you slim – but strangely enough, Bob himself remains morbidly obese!

It is certainly true that we cannot absolutely judge the efficacy and value of Bob’s diet solely by how much he weighs – but we can empirically judge whether or not Bob believes in the efficacy and value of his own diet.

Life is short, and the more rapidly we can make accurate decisions, the better off we are.

Imagine that, this afternoon, a disheveled and smelly man stops you on the street and offers his services as a financial advisor, but says that he cannot take your phone calls because after he declared personal bankruptcy, he has been forced to live in his car. It is certainly logically true that we cannot empirically use his situation to judge the value of his financial advice – but we can know for sure the following: either he has followed his own financial advice, which has clearly resulted in a disaster, or he has not, which means that he does not believe that it is either valuable or true.

Thus, based on the principles of mere efficiency, you would never hire such a vagrant as your trusted financial adviser – partly also due to the basic fact that he seems completely oblivious to the effect that his approach has on his credibility. Does he not recognize how you will view him, based on his presentation? If he does not realize how he appears to you, this also indicates his near-complete disconnect from reality.

In the same way, if I show up for a job interview wearing only a pair of underpants, two clothes-pins and a colander I would like to apologize for any trauma caused by this image., it is clearly true that my choice of dress cannot be objectively used to judge the quality of my professional knowledge – but it certainly is the case that my judgment as a whole can be somewhat called into question, to say the least.

If you do not follow your own advice, I cannot ipso facto use that to judge your advice as incorrect, but I certainly can judge that you believe your advice to be incorrect, and make a completely rational decision about its value thereby.

Academics claim that their teachings are designed to have some effect in the outside world. No medical school teaches Klingon anatomy, because such “knowledge” would have no effect in the world.

Economists teach ideas so that better solutions can be implemented in the real world, which we know because they constantly complain that governments ignore their economic advice. In other words, they are frustrated because politicians constantly choose personal career goals over objectively valuable actions and decisions.

If I am trying to sell a diet book, and I am morbidly obese, obviously that totally undermines my credibility. What is the best way, then, for me to increase my credibility? Is it for me to endlessly complain that other people just don’t seem to believe in my diet?

Of course not.

The simple solution is for me to apply my efforts to that which I actually have control over – my own eating – and stop nagging other people to do what I obviously do not want to do.

This way, I can actually gain even more credibility than I would have had if I had been naturally slim to begin with. Since most people who want to diet are overweight, surely a man who loses a lot of weight – and keeps it off – by following his own diet has even more credibility!

What does this translate to in the realm of academics?

Well, almost all economists accept that free trade is the best way to organize economic interactions – thus they have the enormous collective advantage of already sharing common ideals, which is scarcely the case with politicians and other groups that economists criticize for failing to implement free trade.

If economists believe that free market voluntarism is the best way to organize interactions – and clearly they have far more control over their own profession than they do over governments – then they should work as hard as they can to apply those principles to their own profession. To lose their own excess weight, so to speak, rather than endlessly nag other people to follow the diet that they themselves reject.

Thus rather than lecture about the virtues and values of a voluntary free-market – with the clear goal of changing the behavior of others – economists should get together and change their own profession to reflect the values that they expect others to follow.

This way, they can do all the research, keep careful notes and publish papers describing the process of getting an organization to reform itself according to the commonly-accepted values of its members. The pitfalls and challenges of achieving such a noble end would be well worth documenting, as a guide and help to others.

Furthermore, since economists all believe that free trade improves quality and productivity, they could as a group measure the quality and productivity of the economics profession before and after the introduction of free trade and voluntarism. This would be an enormously valuable body of research, and would empirically support the case for going through the challenges of undoing protectionism within a profession.

Since academics very much want to have an effect on the outside world, by far the best way of achieving that goal is to reform their own profession to reflect the values that they already profess and hold as a group. They can then bring their own experience – not to mention integrity – to bear on the far greater challenges of helping governments and other organizations reform themselves.

It is quite fascinating that economists – to my limited knowledge at least – have produced virtually endless studies on the negative effects of protectionism in every conceivable field except their own.

If economists do take on the challenge of reforming their own profession according to their own commonly-held values, either such a revolution will succeed, or it will not.

If the revolution succeeds, academics would have the theoretical understanding, empirical evidence and professional credibility to bring their case for free trade to others, with a far greater chance of being successful.

If the revolution does not succeed, then clearly economists would have to give up the pretense that their arguments could ever have any effect on the outside world, and could begin the process of dismantling their own profession, since it would be revealed as little more than a fraud – the “selling” of a diet that was impossible to follow.

If economists cannot achieve conformity to their values within their own profession, where they share very similar methodologies, have the same goals, and speak the same language, then clearly asking other professions – with far greater obstacles – to reform themselves is ridiculously hypocritical, and fundamentally false.

I am sure that economists have far too much personal and professional integrity to take money for “snake oil” solutions that can never be implemented.

Thus I eagerly look forward to these economists taking their own advice, and reforming their own profession, where they have real control, in order to show other people that it can be done – and how it should be done – and to, as a group, truly achieve the goals that they so nobly profess as their main motivation.

What do you think the odds of this occurring are?

This is why you have never heard of anarchism.

Anarchy and Socializing

Human beings are so constituted – and I in no way think that this is a bad thing of course – to be exquisitely good at negotiating cost/benefit scenarios. This ability is fundamental to all forms of organic life, in that those who are unsuccessful at calculating these scenarios are quickly weeded out of the gene pool – but human beings possess this ability at a staggeringly brilliant conceptual level.

If you have gotten this far in this book, I can tell at least a few things about you. Obviously, you are curious and open-minded, and largely un-offended by original arguments, as long as they at least strive for rationality. I strongly doubt that you are in academia – or if you are, I fully expect lengthy, obtuse and condescending attacks on my arguments to appear in my inbox, or on your blog, within a few hours.

Potential academics have in my experience been irredeemably hostile to what I do because it puts them in an exquisitely tortuous position (this is particularly the case with my book “Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics”).

Wannabe academics have to believe that they are motivated by the pursuit of truth, not of tenure. Given that they have to ingratiate themselves with their academic masters, they must also believe that their professors are motivated by the pursuit of truth as well, not of power, salary and tenure. We can honorably submit ourselves to a moral teacher; we cannot honorably submit ourselves to an amoral teacher.

If academics is about the pursuit of truth, then my particular contributions to the field should at least garner some interest, if only because of the success I have had with laypeople. However, a wannabe grad student will face extreme anxiety at even the thought of bringing some of my work to the attention of his professors, because he knows what their reaction will be – scorn, dismissal, cynical laughter or genial bewilderment – and also that by bringing my work to his professors, he will be undermining the forward progress of his academic career.

Thus what I do is tortuous, particularly to graduate students, because it reveals to them the basic reality of academia, which is that it is not largely to do with the pursuit of truth, but rather is about the currying of influence and favor, and the pursuit of career goals – inevitably, at the expense of the truth itself.

When this is revealed, the long barren stretch of half a decade or more required to pursue and achieve a Ph.D. becomes a desert that truly feels too broad to cross. The anxiety and despair that my work evokes creates fear and hostility – and it is far easier to take that out on me then to question or criticize the academic system or the professors whose approval these moral heroes depend upon.

Furthermore, questioning the moral roots of the system they are embedded in will simply get them ejected from that system (just as anarchistic theory would predict) and will in no way reform that system, or change anyone’s mind within it, or improve the quality of teaching. Thus those who remain will inevitably tell themselves the comforting lie that the system is flawed, granted, but that leaving it would be to abandon one’s post, so to speak, and so the practical and moral thing to do is to struggle through, and improve the quality of teaching as best one can in the future.

Of course, this is all utterly impossible, but it is a tantalizing mythology that does help the average grad student sleep at night.

The reason that I’m talking about these kinds of calculations is that we all face this choice in life when we are presented with a startling and unforeseen argument that we cannot dismantle. Our truly brilliant ability to process cost/benefit scenarios immediately kicks out a series of syllogisms such as the following:

·      Anarchist arguments are valid BUT…

·      I will never have any influence on the elimination of the state in my lifetime;

·      I will alienate, frustrate and bewilder those around me by bringing these arguments up;

·      I will not have any influence on the thinking of those around me;

·      If people have to choose between the truth that I bring and their own illusions, they will ditch both me
and the truth without as much as a backward glance.

·      Thus I will have alienated myself from those around me, for the sake of a goal I can never achieve.

These sorts of calculations flash rapidly through our minds, resulting in an irritation towards the arguments that can never be directly expressed, and fear of any further examination of the truth of one’s social and professional relations.

Society is really an ecosystem of agreed-upon premises or arguments, usually based on tradition. Those who accept the “truth” of these arguments find their practical course through the existing social infrastructure enormously eased; they do not ask people to really think, they do not discomfort others with uncomfortable truths, and thus what passes for discourse in the world resembles more two mirrors facing each other – a narrow infinity of empty reflection, if you will pardon the metaphor.

When a new idea attempts to enter into the intellectual bloodstream of society, so to speak, those who have placed their bets on the continuance of the existing belief structure react as any biological defense system would, with a combination of attack and isolation.

When you get an infection, your immune system will first attempt to kill off the bacteria; if it is unable to do that, it will attempt to isolate it, forming a hard shell or cyst around the infection.

In a similar way, when a new idea “infects” the existing ecosystem of social thinking, intellectuals will first attempt to ignore it, but then will attempt to “kill it off” using a wide variety of emotionally manipulative tricks, such as scorn, eye-rolling, cynical laughter, aggression, insults, condescension, ad hominem attacks and so on.

If these aggressive tactics do not work for some reason, then the fallback position is a rigid attempt to “isolate” those who support the new paradigm.

These tactics are so staggeringly effective that hundreds or thousands of years can pass between significant new intellectual movements and achievements. The last great leaps forward in Western thinking, it could be argued, occurred around the time of the Enlightenment, several hundred years ago, when the new ideas of the free market, and the power and validity of the scientific method emerged. (“Democracy” and the “separation of church and state” were not new concepts, but were inherited from the expanding interest in Roman jurisprudence that occurred after the 14th century through the rise of cities, and the subsequent necessity for more comprehensive and detailed civic laws.) Since then, there have been some dramatic increases in personal liberties – notably, the non-enforcement of slavery and the expansion of property rights for women, but in the 20th century, most of the “new” developments in human thinking tended to be tribal throwbacks, irrational in theory and evil in practice, such as fascism, communism, socialism, collectivism and so on.

Society “survives” by accepting a fairly rigid set of unquestionable axioms. If people start poking around at the root of those axioms, they are first ignored, then attacked, then isolated. Individuals have almost no ability to overturn these core axioms within their own lifetimes – and thus it takes a somewhat “irrational” dedication to truth and reason to take this course.

This is also something that I know about you…

Socrates described himself as a “gadfly” that buzzed around annoying those in society through his persistent questioning – but he himself was bothered by an internal “gadfly” which constantly nagged at him with these same problems.

Given the extraordinarily high degree of discomfort that is generated by questioning social axioms, I know for sure that you are also possessed by one of these internal “Socratic daemons” which will not let you rest in the face of irrationality, or remain content with pseudo-answers to essential questions.

Now that I have opened up at least the possibility of these answers up in your mind, I know that you will keep returning to them, almost involuntarily, turning them over, looking for weaknesses – because of a kind of obsession that you have, or a mania for consistency with reason and evidence.

There are very few of us who, in some sort of Rawlsian scenario, would get on bended knee before birth and demand to be granted this kind of obsessive compulsive dedication to philosophical truth. Given the high degree of social inconvenience, the resulting anxiety, hostility and isolation, and the near-certainty that we shall not live to see the truth we know accepted at large, it would seem to be almost a form of masochism to reopen arguments which everyone else accepts as both proven and moral. We might as well be a police detective questioning a case with 200 eyewitnesses, a confession, and a smoking gun. Just as this detective would be viewed as annoying, irrational and strange…

Well, I’m sure that you get the picture, because you live in this picture.

Thus in attempting to answer the question as to why these ideas, though rational and relatively simple to understand, remain unspoken and unexamined, we can see that any purely practical calculation of the costs and benefits of bringing these issues up, either in academics, or in one’s own personal social circle, would lead any reasonable person to avoid these thoughts for the same reason that we would give a hissing cobra a wide berth.

Of course, the reason that society does progress at all is because all thinking men and women pay at least a surface lip-service to the principles of reason and evidence.

The corruption and falsification of social discourse that inevitably results from state-funded intellectualism represents an enormously powerful and seemingly-overwhelming “front” that can forever keep a rational examination of core premises at bay.

Unfortunately for the academics – though fortunately for us – the rise of the Internet has to at least some degree diminished the threat of isolation, so that those of us dedicated to “truth at all costs” can never be fully isolated from social interaction, even if we must be satisfied with the arm’s-length intimacy of digital relationships.

Whereas in the past I would have had to endure a crippling and futile isolation from those around me, which would have very likely broken my spirit and my desire for “truth at all costs,” I can now converse freely with like-minded people at any time, day or night.

The cost of “the truth at all costs” has thus come down considerably, making it a far more attractive pursuit.

Anarchism and Integrity

Without a doubt, there is no conceivable way to make the case that you should examine or explore anarchy in order to achieve anarchistic goals at a political level. That would be like asking Francis Bacon, the founder of the modern scientific method, to pursue his ideas in order to secure funding for a particle accelerator.

When I was younger, I studied acting and playwriting for two years at the National Theater School in Montréal, Canada. On our very first day, we eager thespians were told that if we could be happy doing anything other than acting, we should do that other thing. Acting is such an irrational career to pursue that no sane calculation of the costs and benefits would ever lead anyone in that direction.

In the same way, if you can be happy and content without examining the core assumptions held by those around you, I would strongly suggest that you never bring the contents of this book up with anyone, and look at what is written about here as a mere unorthodox intellectual exercise, like examining the gameplay that might result from alternate chess rules.

If it is the case, however, that you have a passion for the truth – or, as it more often feels, that the truth has an unwavering passion for you – then the discontentedness and alienation that you have always felt can be profitably alleviated through an exploration of philosophical truth.

Once we begin to cross-examine our own core beliefs – the prejudices that we have inherited from history – we will inevitably face the feigned indifference, open hostility and condescending scorn from those around us, particularly those who claim to have an expertise in the matters we explore.

This can all be painful and bewildering, it is true – on the other hand, however, once we develop a truly deep and intimate relationship with the truth – and thus, really, with our own selves – we will find ourselves almost involuntarily looking back upon our own prior relationships and truly seeing for the first time the shallowness and evasion that characterized our interactions. We can never be closer to others than we are to ourselves, and we can never be closer to ourselves than we are to the truth – the truth leads us to personal authenticity; authenticity leads us to intimacy, which is the greatest joy in human relations.

Thus while it is true that while many shallow people will pass from our lives when we pursue the “truth at all costs,” it is equally true that across the desert of isolation lies a small village – it is not yet a city, nor even a town – full of honest and passionate souls, where love and friendship can flower free of hypocrisy, selfishness and avoidance, where curious and joyful self-expression flow easily, where the joy of honesty and the fundamental relaxation of easy self-criticism unifies our happy tribe in our pursuit and achievement of the truth.

The road to this village is dry, and long, and stony, and hard.

I truly hope that you will join us.

Preface

Any author who gives his work away faces the unique challenge of convincing people who have not invested their money in buying it that it is worth investing their time to read it.

Samuel Johnson once wrote: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” which makes my task even harder, since either Mr. Johnson was a blockhead, or I am.

I do think that there are some circumstances under which releasing a work for free does not necessarily imply that it is worth exactly what readers pay for it. Those proposing radical new approaches to age-old problems – the addition of new thought to the human canon – will not find it particularly easy to get people to pay good money for such mad claims. If I am writing a book on Christianity, then I can sell it to Christians; if I am writing a book on libertarianism, then I can sell it to libertarians; if I am writing a book on politics, I can sell it to the deluded…

If I am writing a book for the future, for a truly free society that is yet to be, who do I sell it to? I cannot even tell in particular detail what this new society might look like, or be able to achieve – save that I am sure that they have not yet found a way to send gold backward through time, and deposit it on my doorstep.

Although improbable, it is not completely impossible that you might find something radical, thrilling and new in this book – despite its cover price. The best way to spread new ideas is to make them as available and accessible as possible, which is why I give everything away, and rely – not without reason – on the generosity of my readers and listeners.

Despite our universal abhorrence, evils continue to plague the world, without respite. We fear and hate war, yet war continues. Our souls revolt against unjust imprisonment and torture, yet such injustices continue. We feel powerless in the face of endless tax increases – and with good reason. We feel agonizing compassion for those who are caught up in the endless bloody nets of tribal conflicts, condemned to mute horror and blank-eyed starvation. The plight of the enslaved weighs down our hearts with the rusty chains of useless sympathy. We would do almost anything to free the world from such monstrous evils – yet we feel so helpless! We all want a free and wonderful world, and yet feel utterly paralyzed before these monsters who commit such universal crimes…

Violence, injustice and brutal control are truly the malignant cancers of our species. Philosophers have chided and reasoned in vain for thousands of years. Governments have been instituted to serve and protect the people – yet always escape the flimsy walls of their paper prisons and spread their choking powers across society, darkening hope and the future.

In this book, I do my part to put an end to these evils.

I know exactly how all these horrors can be ended.

I am fully aware of the outlandishness of this claim. I am fully aware that you have every right to be perfectly skeptical and cynical about the contents of this book. I would not blame you at all if you laughed in my face, spat at my feet – did anything that you pleased – as long as I could get you to turn just one more page.

Because – what if it were possible?

What if it were possible to live in a world free of the terror and genocide of war? What if it were possible to live in a world without unjust imprisonment, institutionalized rape, and the endless subjugation of the helpless and arming of the vicious and evil?

What if you held in your hands a small blueprint that could lead to just such a world? A world of peace and plenty – of compassion, voluntarism, virtue and true liberty?

Isn’t that what we all really dream of?

Isn’t that the world that we wish with all our hearts that our children could inherit?

Isn’t that the world that we would like to take even a few steps towards?

Give this book a few minutes, I beg you.

We can get there.

My next book – “Achieving Anarchy” – will show us how.

Why do we examine the destination before mapping the journey?

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why… can bear with almost any how.”

Before we discuss how to get to freedom, why must know why a stateless society is so essential.

This book will show you what real freedom looks like.

Part 1: Methodology

Introduction

The inevitable – and highly intelligent – questions that arose in response to my last book “Everyday Anarchy” mostly centered on the question of how a stateless society could self-organize in practical terms.

Naturally, these sorts of questions are a fascinating and endless kind of intellectual delight. Much as Alice mused as she fell down the hole at the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s famous book, we intellectuals are tempted to design the future down to the last detail. We try to respond to every conceivable objection with yet another essay on how roads can be delivered in the absence of a government, or how international treaties can work in the absence of law courts, or how children can be protected in the absence of the police, or how national defense can be secured in the absence of a State army, and how the poor can receive an education in the absence of public schools, and how and why doctors will help the impoverished sick without being forced to, and so on.

I have always argued that these answers – though intellectually stimulating and enjoyably debatable – will never convince those who wish to avoid the morality and practicality of nonviolent solutions to the problems of social organization.

For instance, in my last book, as well as a recent video, I provided a proof for anarchy, which relied on the reality of non-contractual special-interest group relationships with up-and-coming politicians. A large number of people wrote to me in response, saying either that such special interest relationships did not exist – surely a laughable proposition, given the 30,000 plus lobbyists registered in Washington, DC alone – or that if I wanted anarchy, and democracy was a great proof of the practical functionality of anarchy, then surely I should be happy with democracy!

There seems to be no end to the foolish statements that can be uttered by those afraid of the truth. The truth, as Socrates gave his life to show, remains highly threatening to entrenched interests and has a very personal and volatile effect on our immediate relationships.

In reality, it is not so much a stateless society that we fear, but rather a family-less and friendless society where we rock gently, hugging our useless truths to our chests; solitary, ostracized, alone, rejected, scorned, derided. The truth is a desert island, we fear, and so as evolutionarily social animals, we join our corrupt circles in mocking and attacking the truth, and resent those who tell the truth, for revealing the corruption that formerly was only visible unconsciously – which is to say, largely invisible.

It is important to understand up front that this book will contain truths that will likely be highly threatening to you – and certainly to those around you. The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters. As I talked about in my book, “Real-Time Relationships,” the predations of the rulers survive on the horizontal attacks of the slaves. Because we savage each other, we remain ruled by savages.

Thus, you may find that as you read this book, you experience a rising frustration and irritation with its contents – and possibly with me as well, if experience is any guide.

I certainly do sympathize with these emotions, and truly understand their cause, but I would strongly urge you to refrain from sending me angry e-mails – for your sake, not mine. It is, as you know, highly unjust to attack a truth teller for the discomfort he causes.

It is not my fault that you have been lied to your whole life long.

Furthermore, the lies exist whether or not you hear the truth – from me, or from anyone else.

Limitations

It is impossible for any single man – or group of men – to ever design or predict all the details of any society. In order for you to get the most out of this book, I will make a few suggestions which may be helpful.

First of all, if you approach this book with the idea that you’re going to find every possible gap in an argument, or nook and cranny where uncertainty may reside, then this book will be a complete waste of time, and will raise your blood pressure for absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

When Adam Smith formulated the arguments for the free market in the late 18th century, it was not considered a requirement that he predict the stock price of IBM in 1961. He began working with a number of observable and empirical principles, and proved them with rational arguments and well-known examples.

The validity of the “invisible hand” was not dependent upon Adam Smith predicting and describing in detail the invention of, say, the Internet. The methods that free men and women invent and use to solve social problems cannot reasonably be predicted in advance, and finding every conceivable fault with any and all such possible predictions is arguing against a mere theoretical possibility, which is both futile and ridiculous.

That having been said, it is still worth reviewing some possible solutions to social organization that do not involve the monopolistic violence of the State. When Enlightenment thinkers attacked and undermined the exploitive illusions of religion, they were not able to provide a valid and scientific system of ethics to replace the mad moral commandments of historical superstition. It certainly is valuable to disprove existing “truths,” but if we do not come up with at least plausible alternatives, these falsehoods inevitably tend to morph and reemerge in a different form. Thus did the death of religion give rise to totalitarianism – just another worship of an abstract and irrational moral absolute; the “State” rather than a “god.” The unjust aristocratic privileges of the minority that the Founding Fathers so railed against simply morphed into the unjust privileges of the majority in the form of “mob rule” democracy – which then morphed back into the unjust aristocratic privileges of the minority in the form of a political ruling class.

Men and societies all need rules to live by, and if existing rules get knocked down, they simply rise again in another form if rational replacements are not provided. Exposing a lie simply breeds different lies, unless the truth is also advanced.

I have set myself a number of goals in the writing of this book that I wanted to mention up front, so you could understand the approach that I am taking – the strengths and weaknesses of what I am up to, as it were.

First, I promise to refrain from exhausting your patience by trying to come up with every conceivable solution to every conceivable problem. Not only would this end up being grindingly boring, but it would also indicate a strange kind of intellectual insecurity, and an unwillingness to give you the respect of accepting that you can very easily think for yourself about the solutions to the problems discussed in this book. My aim is to give you a framework for thinking about these issues, rather than have you sit passively as I explicate the widest variety of solutions to all conceivable problems.

In other words, my purpose in this book is to teach you to be a mathematician, not show you how good a mathematician I am.

Teaching you how to solve problems is far more respectful than giving you solutions. I have always said that everyone is a genius, and everyone is a philosopher. You do not need me to spell out how a stateless society can work in every detail, but rather to give you a framework which you can use to work out your own answers, and satisfy yourself how well a truly free society will work.

When Francis Bacon was putting forward the scientific method in the 16th century, it was not necessary for him to solve every conceivable scientific problem in order to prove the value of his methodology. It certainly was useful for him to show how his methodology had solved a number of vexing problems, and that it pointed the way to answers in a number of other areas, but of course if Bacon had been able to solve every conceivable scientific problem that could ever possibly arise, there would be precious little need for his scientific method at all, since we would just consult his writings whenever we had a scientific problem that we could not solve.

In the same way, as a philosopher I am interested in teaching people how to think in a new way, rather than giving them explicit answers to every conceivable problem. My approach to rational and scientific ethics – Universally Preferable Behavior (UPB) – is to provide people a framework for evaluating moral propositions, rather than to give them an utterly finalized system of ethics. If such a system of ethics ever could be developed – which seems highly unlikely, given the inevitably-changing conditions of life, society and technology – then no one would ever have to think about ethics ever again, and philosophy would fall into the abyss reserved for dead religions and defunct ideologies, interesting only as yet another example of a temporary historical illusion, like the worship of Zeus or Mussolini or Paris Hilton.

The scientific method certainly did – and does – provide an objective methodology for gaining valid knowledge and understanding of the physical world, just as UPB provides an objective methodology for separating truth from falsehood when it comes to evaluating moral propositions, and the free market provides an objective methodology for determining value in the provision of goods and services, through the mechanism of price.

The value of the scientific method only truly becomes apparent when we abandon religious or superstitious revelation as a valid source of “truth.” We only refer to a compass when we become uncertain of our direction. We only begin to develop science when we start to doubt religion. We only begin to accept the validity of the free market when we doubt the ethics and practicality of coercive central planning. On a more personal level, we only begin to change our approach to relationships when we at last begin to suspect that we ourselves may be the source of our problems.

Much like a river, alternative tributaries only arise when the original flow is blocked. The development of new paradigms in thought is in general more provoked than plotted, and erupts from a rising exasperation with the falsehoods of existing “solutions.” This spike in emotion can sometimes arise with extraordinary rapidity, from a slow build to a sudden explosion – and it is my belief that this is where we are poised in the present when it comes to an examination of the use of violence in solving social problems.

As a vivid, living value, the nation-state as an object of worship and a source of practical and moral solutions is as dead as King Tutankhamun. No one truly believes anymore that the State can solve the problems of poverty, of mis-education, of war, of ill health, of security for the aged and so on. Governments are now viewed with extraordinary suspicion and cynicism. It is true that many people still believe that the idea of government can somehow be rescued, but there is an extraordinary level of exasperation, frustration and anxiety with our existing methods of solving social problems. When someone says that we need yet another government program to “solve” all the problems created or exacerbated by previous government programs, most people now view this approach as an eye-rolling non-answer.

Of course, we still hear a lot about government “solutions” in the media, academia, and the arts, but most people now understand – at least emotionally – that this bleating arises from special interest groups that are either threatened or protected by the State – the automatic reaction of “increase regulation!” When a problem arises, this demand no longer comes from the people, but rather from those parties that will benefit from increased regulation.

The rise of the Internet has also rocked the mainstream paradigm of “government as virtue.” In particular, the US-led invasion of Iraq has contributed to a final collapse in belief about the virtue of statist solutions to complex problems. It is easier to believe the lies of the past, since we were not there when they were told – it is harder to believe in the lies of the present, since we can see them unraveling before our very eyes.

Thus, our belief that the government can solve problems is collapsing on two fronts – first, we now understand that the government cannot solve problems – and second, and more importantly, we can see that the government is not giving up any of its control over the problems it so obviously cannot solve.

This last point is worth expanding upon, since it is so important, and so often overlooked.

If the government claims to take our money in order to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, but the government clearly does not solve the problem of poverty, but rather in fact tends to make it worse, what then do we begin to understand when the government continues to take our money?

If I take your money telling you that I will ship you an iPod, what realization do you come to when I neither ship you the iPod nor return your money?

Surely you understand that I only promised you the iPod in order to steal your money.

In the same way, the government did not increase our taxes in order to solve the problem of poverty, but rather claimed that it wanted to solve the problem of poverty in order to increase our taxes. This is the only way to explain the basic fact that the problem of poverty has not been solved – and in fact is worse now – but the government continues to increase our taxes.

We are all beginning to understand – at least at an unconscious level – that the government lies to us about helping others in order to take our money.

The Answer?

If religion is not the answer, and the State is not the answer, then what is?

Well, when a particular “answer” has proven so universally disastrous, the first place to look is the opposite of that answer.

If “no property rights” (communism) is disastrous, then “property rights” (free markets) are most likely to be beneficial.

If faith is disastrous, then science is most likely to be beneficial.

If superstition is disastrous, than reason and evidence are most likely to be beneficial.

If violence is disastrous, then peace and negotiation are most likely to be beneficial.

If the State is disastrous, then anarchism is most likely to be beneficial.

It is this last statement that tends to be the most challenging for people.

Many of us can accept a world without gods and devils, without heaven and hell, without original sin and imaginary redemption – but we cannot accept, or even imagine, a world without governments.

Many of us can picture a world with a minimum government – with a State concerned only with law courts, police and the military – but we cannot picture a world without a government at all.

A Christian can accept a world where 9,999 gods are ridiculous and false illusions, but that his God – the God of the Old Testament – is a true, real and living deity. A Christian remains an atheist with regards to almost every god, but becomes an utter theist with regards to his own deity. Getting rid of almost all gods is utterly sensible – getting rid of that one final God is utterly incomprehensible.

In the same way, Libertarians, Objectivists and other minarchists feel that getting rid of 99% of existing government functions is utterly moral – but getting rid of that last 1% is utterly immoral!

We do not accept these reservations in other areas of our lives, which is enough to make us suspicious of the true motives behind such statements. A woman who is beaten up only once a month lives 99.99% of her life violence-free, but we would not consider her beatings acceptable on that ground. It would be even more ridiculous to say that a woman should not be beaten every day, but that it would be utterly immoral to also suggest that she should not be beaten at all.

If I claim that it is moral to reduce State violence, can I claim that it is utterly immoral to eliminate such violence completely? Can I dedicate my life to reducing the incidence of cancer, but then claim that eliminating cancer completely would be utterly immoral? Can I reasonably set up a charity to reduce poverty, but then claim in my mission statement that the elimination of poverty would be a dire evil?

Of course not – I would be viewed as an irrational lunatic at best for making such statements.

Those who claim that a reduction of violence is a moral ideal, but who then also claim that the elimination of violence would be a moral evil, must at least recognize, if they wish to retain any credibility, that they are proposing an entirely foolish contradiction.

By “violence” here, I do not mean that anarchism will completely eliminate human violence – the violence that I am talking about here is the morally “justified” and institutionalized initiation of force that is the foundation of State power. (I am not going to go into a lengthy discussion here about the nature of the State, or the moral reasoning against the initiation of violence, since I have dealt with those topics at length in my podcasts, and in other books. Suffice to say that the State is by definition a group of individuals who claim the right to initiate the use of force against legally-disarmed citizens in a specific geographical region.)

Thus, I think it is reasonable for us to take the approach that if it were possible to run society without a government, this would be a massive net positive.

When we have governments, we inevitably get wars, politically motivated and unjust laws, the incarceration of nonviolent “criminals,” the over-printing of money and the resulting inflation, the enslavement of future generations through immoral deficits, the mis-education of the young, rampant vote buying, endless tax increases, arms sales around the world, unjust subsidies to specific industries, economic and practical inefficiencies of every conceivable kind, the creation of permanent underclasses through welfare and illegal immigration, vast increases in the power and violence of organized crime through restrictions on drugs, prostitution and gambling – the list of State crimes is virtually endless.

When we choose to justify governments, we inevitably choose to justify the crimes of those in power. Choosing government is also choosing war, genocide, enslavement, financial, moral and educational corruption, propaganda, the spread of violence and so on.

You can never get one without the other. Imagining otherwise is like imagining that you can choose to justify the Mafia without also justifying the violence that it uses to maintain its power. We may as well imagine that we can support the troops without simultaneously supporting the murders they commit.

Given the number of bloody and genocidal crimes that orbit the power of the State, surely we can at least be open to the possibility that society can be organized far more effectively and morally without such an evil power at its center. If it turns out that society can run without a State – even haltingly, even imperfectly – then surely we should accept such practical imperfections for the sake of avoiding such rampant and bottomless crimes against humanity. Surely, even if anarchy were proven to produce fewer and worse roads, we could accept some mildly inconvenient and bumpy rides for the sake of releasing billions of people from direct or indirect enslavement to their political masters.

To analogize this, imagine that someone in the 19th century proved that cotton would be 10% rougher if slavery were abolished. Would it be moral or reasonable for people to say, “Well, it is certainly true that slavery is a great evil, but I still prefer it to slightly less comfortable cotton!”?

No, we would view such monstrous selfishness as staggeringly corrupt. The moral hypocrisy of claiming to be against slavery, but refusing to actually oppose slavery for fear of even the mildest practical inconvenience, would be an ethical evil that would be hard to comprehend.

Thus, when people dismiss the possibility of anarchy out of hand by saying, “Oh, but how would roads be provided?” what they are really saying is that they support war, genocide, tax enslavement and the incarceration and rape of the innocent, because they themselves cannot imagine how roads might be provided in the absence of violence. “People should be murdered, raped and imprisoned because I am concerned that the roads I use might be slightly less convenient.” Can anyone look at the moral horror of this statement without feeling a bottomless and existential nausea?

Now, imagine that the reality of the situation is that roads will be provided far more efficiently and productively in a stateless society?

If that is the case, then the practical considerations turn out to be the complete opposite of the truth – that we are accepting murder, genocide and rape for the sake of bad roads, rather than good roads!

This kind of net loss provides the moral and rational core of the arguments in favor of a stateless society. While it is certainly true that some people will end up losing out under anarchy, it is the evil and corrupt who will lose the most, just as priests lose out in an atheistic society, much to the relief of children everywhere. The true reality of an anarchic society is that the moral goals of every reasonable human being – the alleviation of poverty, the provision of “public services,” the education of the young, the protection of children, the old and the infirm, will actually be created and provided in a positive, productive, gentle and moral manner.

The great lie of the statist society is that the helpless and dependent are protected, when in fact they are trapped and exploited.

The great lie of the statist society is that the ignorant are educated, when in fact they are made even more ignorant.

The great truth of the anarchic society is that the helpless are protected, the ignorant are educated, the sick are treated – and that roads are built, and are better.

To gain the beauty and virtue of anarchism, we sacrifice nothing but our illusions.

Surely, we should actually want to help people, rather than just pretend that we are doing so.

Surely, we should not sacrifice the peace of the world to our fears of imperfect roads.

The Argument from Apocalypse

Of course, people do not say that we should not live in a free society because the roads might be imperfect. The endless argument against anarchism is the “Argument from Apocalypse.” (AFA)

The AFA is not an argument at all, of course, but rather relies on rampant fear mongering, and an argument from intimidation.

Basically, the argument goes something like this:

“We’re all gonna DIEEEEEEE!”

It would actually be nice if it were slightly more sophisticated than that, but the reality is that it is not.

The basic argument is that if we accept proposition “X,” civilized society will collapse, children will die in the streets, the old will end up eating each other, and the world will dissolve into an endless and apocalyptic war of all against all.

This is not an argument at all, since it relies on fear and intimidation. Darwin faced exactly the same “objections” when he first published his theory of evolution. “If we accept that we are descended from apes, everybody will abandon morality, society will collapse, war of all against all etc etc etc.”

Abolitionists faced the same argument when suggesting that slavery should be abolished; atheists face the same silly objections when disproving the existence of God; philosophers have been put to death for suggesting that ethics should be based on something other than superstition; scientists are accused of the same evils whenever some new development threatens people’s existing prejudices – it is all the most rampant nonsense, which survives only because of its endless effectiveness.

The AFA remains effective because of a basic logical fallacy which has doubtless been around since the dawn of speech: “Belief ‘X’ would result in immorality or destruction, and so only a fool or an evil man would advocate ‘X’.”

Since very few people wish to appear either foolish or evil, they tend to back down in the face of this argument, or take the imprudent path – which I have trod many a time – of attempting to disprove the AFA.

“Anarchism results in evil!” cometh the cry – and anarchists around the world endlessly respond with: “No it won’t!” – thus losing the argument before it even begins.

The only thing that is relevant in any intellectual argument is whether it is true or not. Refusing to examine the validity and consistency of a mathematical argument because you fear that accepting its conclusions will result in endless evil is simply surrendering to superstitious fear-mongering, and abandoning your rationality. Propositions cannot be evil – mathematics cannot be evil – statism cannot be evil – error cannot be evil – and the truth is not virtuous!

A proposition cannot strangle a baby; an argument cannot rape a nun, and a theory of anarchism cannot turn people into shrunken-headed zombies in hot pursuit of Will Smith.

A theory of anarchism can only be true or false, valid or invalid, logical or illogical.

If someone deploys the AFA, it proves nothing except that he has no good arguments, and that the proposition in front of him is emotionally unsettling in some way. In other words, all that the AFA proves is intellectual idiocy and emotional immaturity. It is the philosophical equivalent of arguing against the proposition that “ice cream contains milk,” by saying, “I once had a dream that an ice cream monster was trying to eat me!” It is the kind of non sequitur we would expect from a very young child, which would only indicate an utter incomprehension of the proposed statement.

People who are threatened by ideas should at least have the honesty to say, “I am threatened by this idea,” rather than pretend that the idea is somehow objectively threatening to the human race as a whole. If I am afraid of short men, I should be honest about my fears and say, “I am afraid of short men,” rather than vehemently argue that short men will somehow destroy the world!

However, prejudice against anarchists – much like prejudice against atheists – is one of the last remaining acceptable bigotries in the world. We cannot judge any group negatively – except a group that relies on reason, evidence and nonviolence.

Thus, it will not do us any good to run screaming from the idea of a stateless society, imagining all kinds of demonic horrors. If we allow fear-mongering to not only inform, but rather define and direct our thinking, then we are left without the ability to think at all, but instead must sit clutching the skirts of those who tell us tall and terrifying tales.

We cannot judge the truth of an idea by our fears of its effect.

Arguments for or against the existence of gods are not validated by our fears of – or desires for – a godless universe. We cannot oppose a theory of gravity by saying that it is unpleasant to fall down stairs; neither can we oppose a new theory by demanding prior historical examples. The entire point of a new theory is that it is unprecedented; the first man to invent a jet aircraft could scarcely submit examples of jet aircraft flying in the past.

Another common objection to anarchic theories is that they are not embraced or validated by professional intellectuals, philosophers and academics.

This is very true, and, as I explained in great detail in my book, “Everyday Anarchy,” I think we can view this as a positive, rather than a negative.

Still, is it reasonable for me to ask you to reject the near-universal consensus of highly intelligent people – professors, pundits, columnists, academics and so on – simply because they happen to disagree with or ignore the propositions that I am putting forward here? Surely we have all heard of a number of scam artists – particularly on the Internet – who sell snake oil solutions to genuine ailments, preying upon the weak, the desperate and the gullible. Is it reasonable to ask everyone to completely abandon respect for scholarship and professionalism, to turf experts for the sake of their own preferred opinions? Is this not our fear of what the Internet will do to social consensus? Can we not find on the Wild West of the Web articles claiming that smoking is good for you, that space aliens were responsible for 9/11, that exercise is dangerous, fluoride will kill you and eating fat will make you lose weight?

How can we be sure that a theory of anarchism is not just another one of these crackpot ideas that rails against the universal consensus of experts in the field, attempting to dislodge sober scholarship with wild-eyed speculation? Perhaps this book is just a form of elaborate trickery, a playing out of some wretched and buried psychological trauma, designed to separate you from your friends and family by infecting you with strange and illicit ideas – and taking your money to boot, since Freedomain relies on voluntary donations!

Of course, these are all excellent questions to ask, and I for one would be highly unlikely to pit my own judgment against that of, say, my doctor or my accountant. One of the main reasons that we need specialists is because enormous swaths of human knowledge remain buried under entirely counterintuitive paradigms. Who would have thought that making your gums bleed – at least at first – with floss would lead to oral health? Exercise often feels bad, and eating pie always feels very good, and so we need experts to remind us of the long-term effects of such activities, compared to the short-term incentives and disincentives. We prefer to spend money in the moment rather than save it for a rainy day; a surgeon might make us feel very unwell in order to prevent or cure an illness that we may not have even felt yet; a friend might strive to impress upon us the emotional problems of a highly attractive sexual partner; and the dark satisfactions of discharging anger towards a spouse in the present might create for us a very unpleasant future indeed.

In all these areas, we rely on the objectivity and expertise of those around us, who possess the training and knowledge to steer us against our immediate desires, or who are not subject to our own immediate desires – as in the case of our friends – and so can often see things more clearly.

What about the famous idea that deep study tends to lead to moderation? A little learning is a dangerous thing, it is often said – and with good reason. If we are ignorant of the effects of early childhood experiences and the long-term effects on the psychology of the personality, it is far easier to look at criminals as simply “bad guys.” If we are ignorant of the basic truth that history is almost always a tale told by those in power in order to justify and support their own “virtue,” then we shall inevitably be genuinely shocked when we come across the long-lost truths of the vanquished, or the foreign – or the dead.

Thus, should we not look for moderation in our responses to complex questions? The problem of health is complex, requiring a wide variety of inputs from nutritionists, physical trainers, doctors, psychologists and so on – most of whom will counsel a form of Aristotelian moderation. Too little exercise leads to brittle bones and flab; too much exercise leads to injury. Too little food leads to a lack of energy; too much food leads to excess weight. An over-focus on the desires and needs of others leads to codependency; too little focus leads to selfish narcissism. Parents must often attempt to strike a balance between discipline and indulgence; the needs of the many must be balanced with the needs of the few, even in just the business arena; the sacrifice of our own short-term happiness for the sake of the longer-term happiness of another we love is all part and parcel of having a wise, flourishing and positive set of personal and professional relationships.

Given all this complexity, does the answer of “just get rid of the government!” not strike us as overly simplistic? My mother used to talk about three spheres within society – business, government and labor – and the need to find a balance between them. “The endless challenge in society is finding a way to stimulate business growth – but not at the expense of labor – so that there is enough tax revenue for government to provide effective social services.”

This kind of juggling act strikes us as eminently mature in many ways, and recognizes that, just as there is good and bad in every individual, so there is good and bad in every group. You can find bad and corrupt people in the realm of politics, labor and business, if you want – but stretching this basic reality into an outright condemnation of any group seems explicitly prejudicial. A man who has been robbed by a Chinese acrobat would scarcely be justified in demanding that the world be utterly rid of Chinese acrobats. One swallow does not a summer make; nor do bad politicians invalidate the value of government as a whole.

Furthermore, isn’t it rather childish to suggest that we rid ourselves of an institution that is so open and responsive to our feedback? We live in a democracy, for heaven’s sake – why throw the baby out with the bathwater, when we can get involved and change the system? If we do not like a particular company’s business practices, we do not have to throw out “capitalism” as a whole – we can inform others about their odious practices, organize boycotts and so on. Surely the communicative power of the Internet has removed significant barriers to freedom of self-expression and the exchange of information, to the point where we no longer need to sit back when an institution fails to serve us, but rather we can very quickly and effectively work to bring about change in our political system.

It also seems very alarming for us to take the enormous risk of getting rid of a government. Such a radical step has never been taken before as part of a conscious philosophical program. Governments have collapsed, of course – and we can only look at the example of Somalia to see the infighting and warlords that can arise from such a situation – and governments have been taken over, either internally or externally – but there is no example in history of consciously dismantling a State without any goal of replacing it. Does it seem sensible to go directly against the entire collective history of our species, and throw out an essential human institution that has been around as long as we have? Other radical “reorganizations” of human society have resulted in endless slaughter, chaos, war, and the staggering disorientation of children raised without families, of rampant polygamy, communal “ownership” and so on. It does seem to be a particular curse of our species that every generation or two, some new idea comes along which aims to overthrow the entire history of human interaction, and replace the controlled hurly-burly of a State-managed free market with something like fascism, socialism or communism. Then, some other wild-eyed rebel comes along and decries that, “family is dictatorship,” and attempts to undermine and destroy that most essential component of social life, the nuclear family. Then someone else comes along and says, “Property is theft!” and the cycle just seems to start all over again.

The basics of human society – of human life itself – seem to be that families are good, that private property is important, that the greed of the free market cannot provide all possible goods and services, that some form of centralized regulation and law-making seems to be essential, that there is good and bad in everyone, but there are some very good people, and some very bad people, and that the good people need a government to protect them from the bad people.

I confess that it must be quite exasperating for people to hear some of the basics that are so commonly accepted as truths opened up once more for a new examination. Perhaps it feels somewhat akin to a biologist being lectured to by a creationist during a long intercontinental flight, or a math teacher being cornered by a hyper-intense student strung out on caffeine who insists that numbers are just an illusion, man!

Scientists do not consistently reopen the basic methodology of the scientific method; economists are not continually overturning the essentials of their own profession – that human desires are limitless, but all resources are limited – and doctors do not continually debate the value of the Hippocratic Oath.

Surely, we can say, some basic aspects of human life can be accepted as given, so that we can have a firm foundation to build our edifices of thought upon. There are certain kinds of philosophers who will continually re-open the question of metaphysics and epistemology, and demand to know how we know that we are not living in the dream of an existential demon, and that everything is a managed illusion, and that we may in fact be a brain in a tank in a form of Matrix! These sorts of “thinkers” do bring up intellectually stimulating questions, to be sure, but there are very few of us who do not inevitably shrug our shoulders after failing to penetrate this veil of ignorance, and shake off the burden of these unanswerable questions, certain that we still have a life to live in the real world, and that to sit and forever ponder these unanswerable questions would be to sink into a form of hyper-intellectual coma.

Finally, let us suppose that it would be a good thing to get rid of the government – well, it might also be nice if we could fly, breathe underwater and sneeze gold! An essential component of rational prioritization is to recognize and separate the possible from the impossible. It may indeed be the case that we live in the dream of a demon, but so what? What possible difference could it make to our daily life if this were, or were not, the case? If it is utterly impossible to get rid of the government – at least in our own lifetime – then isn’t it just a kind of narcissistic self-indulgence to continue to play around with the idea as if it ever could be implemented? We could also theorize that spending a solid week in zero gravity could be an excellent cure for lung cancer, but that would scarcely help the people suffering in our own lifetime. Surely, those of us with the intellectual abilities to traverse such endless abstractions should use our abilities for a more tangible and immediate good, rather than perform the intellectual equivalent of inventing the inner workings of Klingon biology.

We certainly do have the right to be skeptical about those who take their intellectual powers and run off in hot pursuit of the impossible – what could possibly be their motivation? Why would anyone want to get involved in a series of ideas that can never be achieved, that are alienating and frustrating to discuss, that eject these thinkers from anywhere close to the mainstream of social thought – and which create endless awkward silences at dinner parties, sweaty-palmed avoidances in one’s early dating life, endless impossibilities in educational environments, teeth-grinding frustration when reading the newspaper or watching a movie, a reputation for eccentric and strangely intense thinking patterns, habitual eye-rolling from friends, a suspicious intellectual monomania that people kind of have to steer around if they wish to avoid “setting you off” – and, last but not least, some fairly endless challenges when it comes to raising your children, and filling them full of ideas that will doubtless set them approximately one solar system’s league away from their peers.

It seems like an entirely generous estimate to imagine that more than one in 100 people will ever be interested in learning more about anarchism – and perhaps one out of a thousand will avidly pursue the course of thought and become full-fledged anarchists. What are the odds that these incredibly rare creatures will just happen to be scattered around the budding anarchist’s social, familial and educational spheres?

Statistically, anarchism is a surefire recipe for social and familial isolation. After the virus of anarchism infects you, the possibility of infecting others remains very low – thus, you must either retreat to some sort of mental cave, or live a psychologically-perilous form of double life, biting your tongue and averting your eyes whenever the topic of politics, economics or the State comes up.

Given all these dire social consequences – combined with the fact that anarchism will never be implemented in our lifetime – how can we possibly understand the pursuit and acceptance of these wild ideas as anything other than a kind of intellectual shell around a hyper-tender personality, designed to alienate, frustrate and drive people away, perhaps as a result of a tortuous history of parental rejection?

Other than a strange and perverse kind of emotional masochism, what could conceivably motivate someone to take such a mad, vain, futile and unachievable intellectual course?

Surely, even if anarchism is sane, anarchists are not.

It is certainly true that there are many strange people in this world who believe many strange things – and that some of those strange people believe in anarchism. Stalin was both an evil sociopath and an atheist; Hitler was a murderous racist who also knew how to tie his shoes – this does not tell us anything about atheists or people who know how to tie their shoes as a whole.

A Merely Personal Confession…

I can say for myself – and I only mean this for myself – that although the truth often does press down like the weight of a cathedral on my sometimes-sloping shoulders, and though it does lower a dark and rippled glass between myself and the companions and family of my youth, and though it startles and scatters shocked glances in the faces of those around me, and although it renders the present unstable and the future uncertain – even with all that the truth demands and imposes upon me, I would not let you tear it from my heart with any power at your command.

The truth was not something that I set out to pursue. I dabbled in ideas when I was a child, just as I dabbled in playing certain instruments and painting in watercolor – never once dreaming that it would be anything other than a mildly diverting hobby. Looking back on it now, many decades later, it reminds me of one of those horror stories which depicts the disastrous consequences that result from “delving too deep” into the earth. Some sort of unholy beast arises from the depths and lays waste to the surface world – a beast that has lain dormant for hundreds or thousands of years is suddenly disturbed, and awakes with a sky-splitting roar, and a savage and unquenchable hunger for destruction.

During that shock of initial eruption, when the ideas that we started out merely playing with suddenly seem to take on a life of their own, like the escalating spells of Mickey Mouse, we do recoil in horror and leap back as if laser-scoped by a trigger-happy sniper, but we quickly learn the lesson of all horror stories, which is that the monsters are never outside our head.

The truth is an angry, demanding and liberating coach, who drags us kicking and screaming up a sharp and broken mountainside, and then sets us down gently to marvel in breathless wonder at the most beautiful view that can ever be conceived. As our complaints roll emptily down to disappear into the fogs of our past, in a bare ripple of white smoke, our eyes stream with tears in mute gratitude at what we have been able to behold.

Such happy and driven fools often look quite mad to those around them. The truth is a drug that renders the motives of those who pursue it incomprehensible and strangely disturbing to everyone else. The ferocity of truth’s beauty is utterly beyond addictive; there is a passion and almost desperation to regain and reenter the perfection of consistent reason and the beauty of the clicking matchup between thought and observation. It keeps us awake even when we are exhausted; it strikes us with fits of passion even when we must be both silent and still; it obscures mere faces and opens up real minds; it peels away all the petty shallowness of the world and reveals all the glories and horrors of true depth.

And that makes it all worth it. The pursuit of truth only seems like masochism to those who have not tasted its joys. If your personal pleasures tend to center around social acceptance, then you unconsciously know – or perhaps consciously – that the pursuit of philosophical truth and wisdom will strip away that which gives you the most happiness in the moment. In a very real sense, you are huddling at the oasis of small-minded social pleasures, and cannot see beyond the desert that surrounds you, to a wider and greater world.

Unfortunately, there are very few philosophers who will help you to let go of this illusion. Most philosophers will talk endlessly about the beauty of the world beyond the desert, but will not confidently lead people away from the oasis they cling to. “You really should come with me,” they say, “because this oasis is pretty bad, you know, and there is this wonderful world beyond the desert that we should all go to!” And they tug at everyone’s trousers and endlessly cajole everyone to start marching across the desert to this wonderful new world – which baffles and irritates everyone in sight.

“If this new world is so wonderful, and it is supposed to set you so free, then why does the sum total of your freedom appear to be nothing more than your endless insistence that we all follow you out into the desert? If our world is actually so small, petty and unsatisfying, then why do you spend your time here, rather than in this new world that gives you such endless pleasure and freedom? Because we must tell you directly that it appears to us that you are also afraid of this desert, and you do not wish to cross it alone, and so you are desperate to find people who will come with you, because you do not in fact believe in this wonderful new world of happiness and freedom. If you had cancer, and you had discovered a cure for it, you would not refrain from taking that cure until you had convinced everyone else with cancer to take it. Rather, you would take the cure, and document everything with as much detail as possible, so that you could better make the case to others that they should take your cure. But, this is not what you are doing. You say that you have a cure for unhappiness called “wisdom,” but this “cure” seems to require that everyone else take it at the same time. You do not appear to be willing to lead by example, but instead seem to be enslaved by a compulsive need to get everyone else to take this red pill at the same time that you do. Your pursuit of wisdom has clearly not given you the freedom, happiness and peace of mind that you claim it does – that you portray as a benefit in order to sell it to others. The world is full of people who will try to sell you ‘cures’ that they will not take themselves, and there is no good reason to believe that your claim that philosophical wisdom leads to happiness is any different!”

This basic paradox enslaves everyone at the oasis. The anarchist or philosopher, it turns out, is only tortured by his vision of the world beyond the desert – and in fact is only reinforcing everyone’s belief in the necessity of social conformity for the achievement and maintenance of happiness. In this way, the philosopher is actually turning everyone against the pursuit of wisdom, for the sake of his own social anxieties. He is actually portraying philosophy as that which tortures you with a vision that you cannot achieve, but that you must continually harass others to pursue.

Finally, since the philosopher seems utterly unable to even perceive this basic paradox – let alone solve it – how much credibility are those around him going to grant his ability to perceive, pursue and capture the truth? If I claim to be a wonderful mathematician, and go on and on about the glories of exploring numbers, but all that anyone ever sees is my continual frustration at the fact that no one else seems to be very interested in math – and my complete inability to balance my checkbook, or even notice that it doesn’t add up – then will I not be perceived as a kind of arrant fool, motivated by heaven knows what?

The “desert” metaphor is somewhat limited, since when we leave the oasis and cross the desert, we pass completely out of view. However, when we pursue the truth from our love of truth, and shrug off those who do not wish to join us, we do arise as a beacon in our social world, a sort of lighthouse that can help guide the few who are capable of being seized by such a love of truth that they are willing to give up the immediate creature and social comforts of living in a world of lies.

Those of us who cross the desert first can be deemed the most courageous in a way, but I must confess that in fact my journey felt less like a fish who braves leaving the water for the shore than a fish that is caught by the hook of philosophy and yanked unceremoniously from the depths. The future pulled me forward – against my will at times – and it was with great regret that I left almost everyone behind. I was not convinced of the glories of the world beyond the desert, but rather feared that the desert would go on forever, and that actually I might go mad. Fortunately to say the least, this did not happen, and I did discover the world beyond the desert, and all the beauties and truths that it contains.

By the time that my particular journey had slowed to at least a walking pace, I felt very little desire to go back to the oasis and try and get my former companions to join me in this new world. Once we have made the wrenching transition from ignorance to wisdom, we genuinely understand and appreciate the difficulty of the process, and would no more imagine dragging our former companions across this desert than we would choose a random person on the street to join us in an ascent of Everest.

At the end of my last book, I talked about a small village inhabited by those of us who have made it across this desert. I believe that it is our job, if we choose it, to make this little village as hospitable and inviting as possible for those few hardy, thirsty souls that we can see struggling out of the shimmering heat of the sand dunes. Creating a place where truth is welcome is the first goal for us pioneers. We know that we cannot return to the half life that we had before; we know that it would be selfish to continue on and on in the path of wisdom without creating some markers and resting places for those who are following us; and we know that the incredible advances in communication technology have for the first time in history allowed the path across the desert to be mapped and visible.

Never before has it been so relatively inviting to pursue the path of truth and wisdom. The destination is no longer the Socratic cup of hemlock, or Nietzsche’s madness, or Rand’s later cultishness, or the dry death of academic conformity – but rather a gathering place – a forum, I would say – where we can exchange ideas and experiences, and support each other, and learn how to best defend ourselves against those who would do us harm, and build our new homes – virtual though they may be for many – in the company of others, rather than alone, which has so often been the case in the past.

As we make our new homes more comfortable and inviting, we will in fact begin to draw more and more people across the desert, because they will see that there is a destination that can be achieved, and they will get more than a glimpse of the life that can be lived beyond lies. No sailor can navigate by the stars if the night is overcast – or if only one star is visible. As more and more stars wink into view, the navigation becomes easier and easier.

If you are tempted to pursue the freedom of truth and wisdom – or, to be more accurate, if the skyhook of truth and wisdom snatches you into some unsuspected stratosphere – then the choice has to some degree been made for you. To hang suspended between the worlds of conformity and wisdom is to live in a kind of null zone, where you gain neither the satisfactions of conformity nor the joys of wisdom.

It can be truly hard to leave those behind who cannot or will not join you on this journey, and the only consolation that I have been able to offer myself – and which I offer to you now – is that there could be nothing better to do with our lives than to create a world where we do not have to choose between wisdom and companions, between virtue and society – where a unity with truth will not mean a disunity with those around us.

A Few Principles…

Rather than repeat them every time I make an argument, I wanted to put a few principles out up front, before we begin.

First and foremost, although I am an anarchist, I am not a utopian. There is no social system which will utterly eliminate evil. In a stateless society, there will still be rape, theft, murder and abuse. To be fair, just and reasonable, we must compare a stateless society not to some standard of otherworldly perfection, but rather to the world as it already is. The moral argument for a stateless society includes the reality that it will eliminate a large amount of institutionalized violence and abuse, not that it will result in a perfectly peaceful world, which of course is impossible. Anarchy can be viewed as a cure for cancer and heart disease, not a prescription for endlessly perfect health. It would be unreasonable to oppose a cure for cancer because such a cure did not eliminate all other possible diseases – in the same way, we cannot reasonably oppose a stateless society because some people are bad, and a free society will not make them good.

Secondly, I am not proposing any Manichaean view of human nature in this book. I do not believe that human beings are either innately good, or innately evil. I take a very conservative and majority view, which is that human beings respond to incentives, which also happens to be the basis for the discipline of economics. Human beings are not innately corrupt, but they will inevitably be corrupted by power. Most people will respond to situations and circumstances in a way that maximizes their advantage, not explicitly at the expense of others, though that can happen of course, but we are biological as well as moral beings, and there are very few people who will sacrifice the safety and security of their family in order to follow some abstract moral principle. When human beings are forced to choose between virtue and necessity, they will in general choose necessity, and will then rework their definition of virtue to justify their own actions.

That having been said, it seems very clear that human beings are driven to a very large and deep degree by virtue. A man can almost never be convinced to do what he defines as evil – but if that evil can be redefined as a good, men will almost inevitably praise or perform it. Very few men would agree to murder for payment – but very few men will condemn soldiers as murderers.

Very few people would openly say that they oppose rape, but support the rapists – however, when the same moral equation is redefined as a good, just about everyone says that they oppose the war, but support the troops.

This is one of the lessons that I explicitly take from our existing ruling class, which is that the power of propaganda to redefine evil as good is a fundamental mechanism for controlling people and making them do what you want. Before any government can truly expand, it first needs to take control of the money supply, in order to bribe citizens, and the educational system, in order to indoctrinate children. A large percentage of the army’s communications budget is dedicated to propaganda, and I assume that these people know more than a little about how to best spend money to control the minds of others.

Thus, I do understand that the reason that the debate about a stateless society is so volatile and aggressive is because anarchists are fundamentally attempting to reclaim the definition of virtue in society – and since society as a collective is largely defined by generally-accepted definitions of virtue, the anarchist approach to ethics is an attempt to fundamentally rewrite society as a whole.

Prior attempts to do this have almost always resulted in disaster, because they have always relied on gaining control of the government and using its power to impose some new version of ethics on a disarmed citizenry. The anarchist approach is particularly unsettling because we say that initiating violence to solve social problems is a great evil – perhaps the greatest evil – and so we steadfastly reject and refuse political solutions.

In the current world of governments, not only is political violence used to solve ethical problems, but also the use of such violence is itself considered virtuous and wise. Thus anarchists are entirely above the existing debate, because we are not trying to grab the gun and point it in the direction that we approve of, but rather are pointing out that violence cannot be used to achieve a positive good within society. Thus not only are existing solutions immoral, but the entire methodology for solving problems is based on a moral evil – the initiation of the use of force.

This is a fundamental rewrite of society, and people are right to be concerned and skeptical about the anarchist approach. It is the most fundamental transition that can be imagined – it is the difference between asking how slaves can be treated better, and stating that slavery is an irredeemable moral evil. It is the difference between asking what transgressions children should be beaten for, and stating that beating children is always and forever immoral.

Using the past to justify the future…

An objection to anarchism that I hear fairly often is that human beings are not so constituted as to be able to productively and intelligently rule themselves.

This objection rests on such a fundamental error that it is worth dealing with up front, since it will show up time and again in the upcoming arguments for anarchism.

We can all understand that it would be completely irrational to say that slaves cannot be freed, because they lack initiative and education. We all perfectly understand that slaves are barred from education, and punished for taking initiative. It is like saying that a totalitarian economy cannot be privatized because all of the workers are lazy – it is clear that this “laziness” actually arises out of a totalitarian economy, rather than any innate habits of the workers. Nutritionists might as well say that fat people cannot lose weight, because they are fat. The entire purpose of an expert is to help undo the habits that ignorance and a lack of opportunity has bred, and substitute more rational and positive behaviors in their place.

It is certainly true that people who come out of a statist educational system tend to be functionally retarded in many ways – they do not understand law, they do not understand politics, they do not understand economics, they do not understand philosophy, they have very likely never taken a course in logic – or even been offered one – they do not understand the scientific method, and they fundamentally do not know how to think or debate from first principles.

These are just the natural and disgusting results of the existing system – to say that men cannot be free because they lack the habits that freedom would have inculcated is a completely circular argument – it is like saying that newborn chicks of geese that have had their wings clipped can never fly, or that the daughter of a Chinese woman who suffered through foot binding will be born with bound feet.

Rejecting the virtues of the future for the sake of the evils of the past creates a closed-loop system that we can never escape. When anarchism comes to pass, there will doubtless be challenging and wrenching transitions for many people – but so what? This is actually an argument for anarchism, rather than against it. The harder that it is to transition out of a violent statist society, the more it is necessary to do so, and to prevent it from ever reemerging again. We do not say that heroin is less dangerous because it is so hard to quit, or so addictive – this is a central reason why heroin should not be taken in the first place! Constantly increasing our dosage of heroin because it is hard to quit would scarcely be a rational response to the problem of deadly addiction. The harder it is to quit, the more we should try to quit it, and the more we should strive to avoid re-addiction.

You are not the only kind person on the planet…

Another point that I would like to make up front is that there always seems to be a strange disconnect or isolation in people’s concerns about the helpless and dependent in society.

For instance, whenever I talk about getting rid of public schools, the response inevitably comes back – automatically, it would seem, just like any other good propaganda – that it would be terrible, because poor children would not be educated.

There is a strange kind of unthinking narcissism in this response, which always irritates me, much though I understand it. First of all, it is rather insulting to be told that you are trying to design a system which would deny education to poor children. To be placed into the general category of “yuppie capitalist scum” is never particularly ennobling.

A person will raise this objection with an absolutely straight face, as if he is the only person in the world who cares about the education of poor children. I know that this is the result of pure indoctrination, because it is so illogical.

If we accept the premise that very few people care about the education of the poor, then we should be utterly opposed to majority-rule democracy, for the obvious reason that if only a tiny minority of people care about the education of the poor, then there will never be enough of them to influence a democracy, and thus the poor will never be educated.

However, those who approve of democracy and accept that democracy will provide the poor with education inevitably accept that a significant majority of people care enough about the poor to agitate for a political solution, and pay the taxes that fund public education.

Thus, any democrat who cares about the poor automatically accepts the reality that a significant majority of people are both willing and able to help and fund the education of the poor.

If people are willing to agitate for and pay the taxes to support a State-run solution to the problem of education, then the State solution is a mere reflection of their desires and willingness to sacrifice their own self-interest for the sake of educating the poor.

If I pay for a cure for an ailment that I have, and I find out that that cure actually makes me worse, do I give up on trying to find a cure? Of course not. It was my desire to find a cure that drove me to the false solution in the first place – when I accept that that solution is false, I am then free to pursue another solution. (In fact, until I accept that my first “cure” actually makes me worse, I will continue to waste my time and resources.)

The democratic “solution” to the problem of educating the poor is the existence of public schools – if we get rid of that solution, then the majority’s desire to help educate the poor will simply take on another form – and a far more effective form, that much is guaranteed.

“Ah,” say the democrats, “but without being forced to pay for public schools, no one will surrender the money to voluntarily fund the education of poor children.”

Well, this is only an admission that democracy is a complete and total lie – that public schools do not represent the will of the majority, but rather the whims of a violent minority. Thus votes do not matter at all, and are not counted, and do not influence public policy in the least, and thus we should get rid of this ridiculous overhead of democracy and get right back to a good old Platonic system of minority dictatorship.

This proposal, of course, is greeted with outright horror, and protestations that democracy must be kept because it is the best system, because public policy does reflect the will of the majority.

In which case we need have no fear that the poor will not be educated in a free society, since the majority of people very much want that to happen anyway.

Exactly the same argument applies to a large number of other statist “solutions” to existing problems, such as:

• Old-age pensions;
• Unemployment insurance;
• Health care for the impoverished;
• Welfare, etc.

If these State programs represent the desires and will of the majority, then removing the government will not remove the reality of this kind of charity, since government policies reflect the majority’s existing desire to help these people.

If these programs do not represent the desires and will of the majority, then democracy is a complete lie, and we should stop interfering with our leader’s universal benevolence with our distracting and wasteful “voting.”

We will get into this in more detail as we go forward, but I wanted to put the argument out up front, just to address the ridiculous objection that removing a democratic State also removes the benevolence that drives its policies.

A fundamental anarchic argument is that a democratic State uses the genuine benevolence of the majority to expand its own power, and exacerbates poverty, ignorance and sickness in order to justify and continue the expansion of that power.

This is not the first time that the benevolence of good people has been used to control them.

We only need to think of the example of organized religion to understand that…

One final point, and then we shall begin really rolling up our sleeves and having some fun figuring out how a free society can truly work.

Although the ideas of anarchy can be alarming, it is important to remember that anarchy is not an untried and untested system. As I talked about in my last book, anarchy is the foundation of how we organize our own personal lives, and it is also the root of how the government manages to survive, at least for as long as it does, despite its corrupt and evil nature.

Prior approaches to re-writing social ethics failed because they did not evolve out of what works in our personal lives. We fully accept that theories of physics cannot contradict that which is directly observable within our own lives; that which describes a falling planet cannot contradict our direct perception of a falling brick.

Indeed, since we would so strenuously resist the incursion of State power into our own personal and practical “anarchy,” it can be easier to understand how statism is a violent and artificial solution, not anarchy.

If we look at something like communism, we can see that it represented a radical reversal of what actually works in our own personal lives. We retain and trade property constantly in our own lives. Stripping us of the right to own and trade property is an entirely artificial “oppositional solution,” which is why it had to be imposed through endless violence, murder and imprisonment.

In the same way, when we look at something like religion, we can see that it represents a radical reversal of what we actually believe to be true in our own personal lives. Children do not need threats, bribes and propaganda to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that gravity works and concrete is hard on the knees. They do not need to be bullied in order to learn language, or grow physically and mentally, or ask endless questions and explore their environment.

However, to believe that some ancient and fantastical Jewish zombie died for their “sins,” and that they are trailed and judged by an omnipresent and invisible ghost, and that they need to eat and drink symbolic flesh and blood to commune with some universal and incorporeal mind – well, that takes an enormous amount of propaganda, bribery and bullying. Religion is an entirely artificial “oppositional solution” to the question of existence and ethics. It must be repetitively and aggressively inflicted on children, because it scarcely comes naturally to them at all.

Anarchy, however, does not fall into this category.

For instance, when you face a problem at work, I can’t imagine that you ever sit your team down and say:

“I’ve come up with the perfect solution to our problem – what we’re going to do, see, is pick two of us, give them guns, and then those two are going to force the rest of us to do whatever they want for the next few years, and then we are going to perhaps pick two other people who will get those guns, and then they’ll be able to force us to do whatever they want us to do for the next few years, and then we’ll start all over again…”

I have yet to see a business book with anything close to the title of: “Creating A Violent Internal Monopoly To Solve Your Customer Service Woes!”

In the same way, if you face problems in your relationship, you may go to a marriage counselor, but I have never heard of any couple going to the Mafia, and saying: “We can’t quite agree on how we should be spending our money, so we’re going to buy you guys a bunch of guns and bombs, and we want you to tell us what to do, and if we disobey your orders, we want you to kidnap us and throw us in some dank and horrible cell, where we can only hope to be raped by other people!”

If you are looking for a job, I do not imagine that you will kidnap someone and force him to hire you. If you want a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, I cannot believe that you will chloroform and kidnap someone you are attracted to, like the protagonist in John Fowles’s “The Collector.”

If you are having trouble parenting, it does not seem at all likely that you will hire someone to kidnap you if you parent in a way that he disagrees with for some reason.

This list can of course go on and on, but the basic reality is that we never look for statist solutions to problems that we face in our own lives. We never create a localized monopoly, arm it and give it the right to take half our income at gunpoint, and then force us to obey its whims.

Statism and Isolation

There is something about statism, some aspect of it, which profoundly isolates us from our fellow citizens. We turn from animated problem-solvers to mindless defenders of the status quo. As an example, I offer up the inevitable response I receive when I provide an anarchic solution to an existing State function. When I say that theoretical entities called Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) could enforce contracts and protect property, the immediate response is that these DROs will inevitably evolve into a single monopoly that will end up recreating the State that they were supposed to replace.

Or, when I talk about private roads, I inevitably hear the argument that someone could just build a road in a ring around your land and charge you a million dollars every time you wanted to cross it.

Or, when I talk about private defense agencies that can be used to protect a geographical region from invasion, I am promptly informed that those private agencies will simply turn their guns on their subscribers, take them over, and create a new State.

Or, when I discuss the power of economic ostracism as a tool for maintaining order and conformity to basic social and economic rules, I am immediately told that people will be “marked for exclusion” unless they pay hefty bribes to whatever agencies control such information.

It is the same story, over and over – an anarchic solution is provided, and an immediate “disaster scenario” is put forward without thought, without reflection, and without curiosity.

Of course, I am not bothered by the fact that people are critical of a new and volatile theory – I think that is an essential process for any new idea.

What does concern me is the fundamental lack of reciprocity in the minds of the people who thoughtlessly reject creative solutions to trenchant problems.

I don’t mean reciprocity with regards to me – though that is surely lacking as well – but rather with regards to any form of authority or influence in general.

For instance, if people in a geographical region want to contract with an agency or group of agencies for the sake of collective defense, what is the greatest fear that will be first and foremost in their minds?

Naturally, it will be that some defense agency will take their money, buy a bunch of weapons, and promptly enslave them.

How does a free society solve this problem? Well, if there is a market need or demand for collective defense, a number of firms will vie for the business, since it will be so lucrative in the long term. The economic efficiency of having a majority of subscribers would drive the price of such defense down – however, the more people that you enroll in such a contract, the greater everyone’s fear will be that this defense agency will attempt to become a government of some kind.

Thus no entrepreneur will be able to sell this service in the most economically efficient manner if he does not directly and credibly address the fear that he will attempt to create a new government.

We are so used to being on the one-sided receiving end of dictatorial edicts from those in power – whether they are parents, teachers, or government officials, that the very idea that someone is going to have to woo our trust is almost incomprehensible. “If I am afraid of something that someone wants to sell me, then it is up to that person to calm my fears if he wants my business” – this is so far from our existing ways of dealing with statist authority that we might as well be inventing a new planet.

It is so important to understand that when we are talking about a free society – and I will tell you later how this habit is so essential for your happiness even if anarchism never comes to pass – we are essentially talking about two sides of a negotiation table.

When it comes to government as it is – and all that government ever could be – we are never really talking about two sides of the table. You get a letter in the mail informing you that your property taxes are going to increase 5% – there is no negotiation; no one offers you an alternative; your opinion is not consulted beforehand, and your approval is not required afterwards, because if you do not pay the increased tax, you will, after a fairly lengthy sequence of letters and phone calls, end up without a house.

It is certainly true that your local cable company may also send you a notice that they’re going to increase their charges by 5%, but that is still a negotiation! You can switch to satellite, or give up on cable and rent DVDs of movies or television shows, or reduce some of the extra features that you have, or just decide to get rid of your television and read and talk instead.

None of these options are available with the government – with the government, you either pay them, give up your house, go to jail, or move to some other country, where the exact same process will start all over again.

Can you imagine getting this letter from your cable company?

Dear Valued Customer:

Your cable bill is now increasing 5% per month. You cannot cancel your cable. Ever. You cannot reduce your bill in any way. If you turn off your cable, your bill will remain exactly the same. If you rip your cable out of the wall, your bill will remain exactly the same, with the exception that we will charge you for the damage. Your children will be unable to cancel your cable contract.

Also, please note that we will be reducing our delivery of channels by approximately 1 every month. As we deliver fewer channels, you can anticipate that your bill will sharply increase.

If you do not pay your bill on time, the ownership of your house will revert to us, and we will lock you in an undisclosed location, where you will be forced to do tech support, and where we will be unable to protect you from assault and rape.

If you attempt to defend yourself when we come to take your house, we are fully authorized to gun you down.

Sincerely,

The Statist Cable Company

We would consider this kind of letter to be utterly criminal – and we would be outraged at the dictatorial one-sidedness of the letter, as well as the threats of violence it contained.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of communication that we get from our governments all the time – and in many ways, it is not unrelated to the kind of non-negotiated dictums that we received from our teachers when we were children.

Thus, when a philosopher of anarchy proposes private solutions to public services, we automatically and almost unconsciously feel that we are back on the receiving end of one-sided and dictatorial commandments, and fear this multiplicity of small “quasi-governments,” and imagine that instead of receiving a few such ugly letters a year, we shall get perhaps dozens per month.

However, if you do not understand that anarchism is always and forever a two-sided negotiation, then you will remain forever untempted by its rational and empirical pleasures, and continue to confuse coercion with voluntarism, which is about the most fundamental error that can be made in moral understanding.

If you feel the need for collective defense, but you are afraid that whoever you contract with for such defense will end up ruling over you, you can just sit back, put your feet up on the desk, clasp your hands behind your head, and just see who comes along with an offer that satisfies you.

Once you grasp this fundamental shift in thinking – in understanding – then you can “flip over” to the other side of the table and use your real creative mojo to start solving the problem.

In this way, you can ask yourself, “If I really wanted to sell collective defense services to a group, how could I best address and alleviate their fears that I would turn into some kind of local dictator?”

What do you think? If you could personally make $10 million a year by solving this problem, what would you come up with? How would you address and alleviate people’s fears that you would take their money, go buy an army, and rule over them?

There are as many creative and productive answers as there are people interested in the problem – here’s one that occurs to me, just off the top of my head…

I would deposit $5 million in a third-party bank account, and offer it as free payment to anyone who could prove that I was not fulfilling my contract with my customers to the letter. I would publish my accounts and inventory as widely as possible, and give free access to anyone who wanted to come by and inspect my business and its holdings.

In this way, people could rest assured that I was not amassing some secret army of black helicopters and men in robot suits.

“Ah,” you may say, “but what if no one wanted to come forward and perform these kinds of inspections?”

Again, that is easy to solve. I would just pay an organization $1 million a year to audit my business – and promise them that if they ever found me accumulating any kind of secret army or weaponry, then I would then pay them the $5 million in the third party bank account. In this way, external audits would be certain to be performed, and those auditors would have every incentive to turn over every filing cabinet in search of a miniature robot army.

“Ah,” you may say, “but what if you were secretly paying this auditing organization $2 million a year to only pretend to audit your business?”

Well, here we are starting to get into some very strange economic territory, which would be utterly unsustainable in a free market, because my company would then be out $5 million up front, be paying $1 million for an auditing company, and then a further $2 million to produce fake audits – such a company would never be able to offer competitive rates relative to a company that operated on the up and up.

But even if this were possible, it would still be an easy problem to solve, by simply paying five companies to perform audits if necessary – paying $5 million a year out of a profit of $10 million a year still leaves you $5 million ahead!

“Ah, but what if..?”

We all know that this game can go on for forever and a day – the mindset that I strongly urge you to try and get yourself into, however, is that you do not have to contract with anyone who is not willing to satisfy your desires!

Relative Risk

What happens if no entrepreneur is able to offer you a deal that successfully calms your fears?

Why, then you do not have to take any deal at all.

“Ah,” you may then say, “but then I am leaving myself open to the risk of foreign invasion!”

Well, that is very true, but clearly, if you reject all offers from entrepreneurs who want to protect you, because you feel that their protection carries too much risk, then clearly you prefer the risk of invasion to the risk of protection.

With that in mind, you may well choose one entrepreneur’s scheme – not because it is risk-free, but rather because it is less risky than the risk of invasion.

If you wish to be presented with a risk-free choice, then unfortunately you wish to be presented with a different kind of universe than the one we inhabit, since risk is an inevitable and natural part of life.

With that in mind, let us turn to one of the first great objections to the idea of a stateless society, which is collective defense, to provide an example of the methodologies we will use in this book.

Collective Defense: An Example of Methodology

Ideally, invasions should be prevented rather than repelled, just as illnesses should be prevented rather than cured.

The strongest conceivable case for anarchism is that a stateless society would by its very nature prevent invasion, rather than merely possess the ability to violently repel it.

So first, before we figure out how to repel an invasion, let us look at what an invasion is actually designed to achieve.

Why Invade?

Let us imagine a land where there are two farms, owned by Bob and Jim respectively. Bob is a rapacious and nasty fellow, who wishes to expand his farm and make more money.

To the east of Bob is Jim’s farm, which is tidy, efficient, and productive, with a wide variety of cows and chickens and neatly-planted fields.

To the west of Bob is an untamed wilderness full of bears and wolves and coyotes and mosquitoes and swamps and all other sorts of unpleasant and dangerous things.

From the standpoint of mere practical considerations, how can Bob most efficiently expand his farm and increase his income?

Surely it would be to invest in a few guns, head east, and take over Jim’s farm. For a very small investment, Bob ends up with a functioning and productive farm, ready to provide him with milk, eggs and crops.

On the other hand, Bob could choose to go west, into the untamed wilderness, and try to cull a number of dangerous predators, drain the swamps, hack down and uproot all the embedded trees and bushes. After a year or two of backbreaking labor, he may have carved out a few additional acres for himself – an investment that would scarcely seem worth it.

If Bob wants to expand, and cares little about ethics, he will “invade” Jim’s farm and take it over, because he will be taking command of an already-existing system of exploitation and production.

Thus, we can see that the act of invading a neighboring territory is primarily motivated by the desire to take over an existing productive system. If that productive system is not in place, then the motivation for invasion evaporates. A car thief will never “steal” a rusted old jalopy that is sitting up on bricks in an abandoned lot, but rather will attempt to steal a car that is in good condition.

This analysis of the costs and benefits of invasion is essential to understanding how a stateless society actually works to prevent invasion, rather than merely repel it.

When one country invades another country, the primary goal is to take over the existing system of government, and thus collect the taxes from the existing citizens. In the same way that Bob will only invade Jim’s farm in order to take over his domesticated animals, one government will only invade another country in order to take over the government of that country, and so become the new tax collector. If no tax collection system is in place, then there is no productive resource for the invading country to take over.

Furthermore, to take a silly example, we can easily understand that Bob will only invade Jim’s farm if he knows that Jim’s cows and chickens are not armed and dangerous. To adjust the metaphor a little closer to reality, imagine that Jim has a number of workers on his farm who are all ex-military, well-armed, and will fight to the death to protect that farm. The disincentive for invasion thus becomes considerably stronger.

In the same way, domestic governments generally keep their citizens relatively disarmed, in order to more effectively tax them, just as farmers clip the wings of their geese and chickens in order to more efficiently collect their eggs and meat.

Thus the cost-benefit analysis of invasion only comes out on the plus side if the benefits are clear and easy to attain – an existing tax collection system – and if the costs of invasion are relatively small – a largely disarmed citizenry.

In a very real sense, therefore, a stateless society cannot be invaded, because there is really nothing to invade. There are no government buildings to inhabit, no existing government to displace, no tax collection system in place to take over and profit from – and, furthermore, there is no clear certainty about the degree of armaments that each citizen possesses (don’t worry, we will get into gun control later…).

An invading country can be very certain that, if it breaks through another government’s military defenses, it will then not face any significant resistance from the existing citizenry. A statist society can be considered akin to an egg – if you break through the shell, there is no second line of defense inside. Invading governments are well aware of the existing laws against the proliferation of weapons in the country they are invading – thus they are guaranteed to be facing a virtually disarmed citizenry, as long as they can break through the military defenses.

Invading Anarchy

Let us imagine that France becomes a stateless society, but that Germany and Poland do not. Let us go with the cliché and imagine that Germany has a strong desire to expand militarily. The German leader then looks at a map, and tries to figure out whether he should go east into Poland, or west into France.

If he goes east into Poland, then he will, if he can break through the Polish military defenses, be able to feast upon the existing tax base, and face an almost completely disarmed citizenry. He will be able to use the existing Polish tax collectors and tax collection system to enrich his own government, because the Poles are already controlled and “domesticated,” so to speak.

In other words, he only has one enemy to overcome and destroy, which is the Polish government’s military. If he can overcome that single line of defense, he gains control over billions of dollars of existing tax revenues every single year – and a ready-made army and its equipment.

On the other hand, if he thinks of going west into France, he faces some daunting obstacles indeed.

There are no particular laws about the domestic ownership of weapons in a stateless society, so he has no idea whatsoever which citizens have which weapons, and he certainly cannot count on having a legally-disarmed citizenry to prey on after defeating a single army.

Secondly, let us say that his army rolls across the border into France – what is their objective? If France still had a government, then clearly his goal would be to take Paris, displace the existing government, and take over the existing tax collection system.

However, where is his army supposed to go once it crosses the border? There is no capital in a stateless society, no seat of government, no existing system of tax collection and citizen control, no centralized authority that can be seized and taken over. In the above example of the two farms and the wilderness, this is the equivalent not of Bob taking over Jim’s farm, but rather of Bob heading into the wilderness and facing coyotes, bears, swamps and mosquitoes – there is no single enemy, no existing resources to take over, and nothing in particular to “seize.”

But let us say that the German leadership is completely retarded, and decides to head west into France anyway – and let us also suppose, to make the case as strong as possible, that everyone in France has decided to forego any kind of collective self-defense.

What is the German army going to do in France? Are they going to go door to door, knocking on people’s houses and demanding their silverware? Even if this were possible, and actually achieved, all that would happen is that the silverware would be shipped back to Germany, thus putting German silverware manufacturers out of business. When German manufacturers go out of business, they lay people off, thus destroying tax revenue for the German government.

The German army cannot reasonably ship French houses to Germany – perhaps they will seize French cars and French electronics and ship them to Germany instead.

And what is the German government supposed to do with thousands of French cars and iPods? Are they supposed to sell these objects to their own citizens at vastly reduced prices? I imagine that certain German citizens would be relatively happy with that, but again, all that would happen is that German manufacturers of cars and electronics would be put out of business, thus again sharply reducing the German government’s tax income, resulting in a net loss.

Furthermore, by destroying domestic industries for the sake of a one-time transfer of French goods, the German government would be crippling its own future income, since domestic manufacturing represents a permanent source of tax revenue – this would be a perfect example of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Well, perhaps what the German government could do is seize French citizens and ship them to Germany as slave labor. What would be the result of that?

Unfortunately, this would not work either, at least not for long, because slave labor cannot be taxed, and slave labor would displace existing German labor, which is taxable. Thus again the German government would be permanently reducing its own income, which it would not do.

Another reason that Germany might invade another country would be to seize control of the wealth of the government – the ability to print money, and the ownership of a large amount of physical assets, such as buildings, cars, gold, manufacturing plants and so on.

However, nothing remains unowned in a stateless society, except that which has no value, or cannot be owned, such as air. There are no “public assets” to seize, and there are no state-owned printing presses which can be used to create currency, and thus transfer capital to Germany. There are no endless vaults of government gold to rob, no single aggregation of military assets to seize.

Furthermore, if we go up to a thief and say to him, “Do you want to rob a house?” what is his first question likely to be?

“Hell I don’t know – what’s in it?”

A thief will always want to know the benefits of robbing a house – he is fully aware of the risks and costs, of course, and must weigh them against the rewards. He will never scale up the outside of some public housing welfare tenement in order to snag an old television and a tape deck. The more knowledgeable he is of the value of a home’s contents, the better he is able to assess the value of breaking into it.

The German leadership, when deciding which country to invade, will know down to almost the last dollar the tax revenues being collected by the Polish government, as well as the value of the public assets they will seize if they invade. The “payoff” can be very easily assessed.

On the other hand, if they look west, into the French stateless society, how will they know what they are actually going to get? There are no published figures for the net wealth of the society as a whole, there is no tax revenue to collect, and there are no public assets which can be easily valued ahead of time. There is no way to judge the cost effectiveness of the invasion.

Invading a statist society is like grabbing the cages of a large number of trapped chickens – you get all of the eggs in perpetuity. Invading a stateless society is like taking a sprint at a flock of seagulls – all they do is scatter, and you get nothing, except perhaps some crap on your forehead.

Thus it is completely impossible that the German leadership would think it a good idea to head west into France rather than east into Poland.

We could leave the case here, and be perfectly satisfied in our responses, but I am always willing to go the extra mile and accept the worst conceivable case.

Let us say that some mad German who was beaten with bagfuls of French textbooks when he was a child ends up running the government, and cares nothing at all about the costs and benefits of invading France, but rather just wishes to take it over in order to – I don’t know, burn all the textbooks or something like that.

We will get into the nature and content of private agencies in the next chapter, but let us just say that there are a number of these private defense agencies that are paid to defend France against just such an invading madman.

Well, if I were setting up some sort of private military defense agency, the first thing I would do is try to figure out how I could most effectively protect my subscribers, for the least possible cost.

The first thing that I would note is that nuclear weapons have been the single most effective deterrent to invasion that has ever been invented. Not one single nuclear power has ever been invaded, or threatened with invasion – and so, in a very real sense, there is no bigger “bang for the buck” in terms of defense than a few well-placed nuclear weapons.

If we assume that a million subscribers are willing to pay for a few nuclear weapons as a deterrent to invasion, and that those nuclear weapons cost about $30 million to purchase and maintain every year, then we are talking about $30 a year per subscriber – or less than a dime a day.

The defense agencies only make money if an invasion does not occur, just as health insurance companies only make money when you are not sick, but rather well.

Thus the question that I would be most keen to answer if I were running a defense agency is: “How can I best prevent an invasion?”

Let us assume that the French stateless society is a beacon of liberation in a sea of aggressive and statist nations. The French defense agencies would work day and night to ensure that the costs of invasion were as high as possible, and the benefits as low as possible. Were I running one of these agencies, I would think of solutions along the lines of the following…

Deactivated Money

If I were concerned that my subscribers might be robbed by an invading army, I would offer reduced rates to those willing to allow their electronic money to be secured so that it could not be spent without their own thumb print, or something like that. (Naturally, any system can be hacked, and people can be kidnapped along with their money, but the purpose here is not to prevent all possible workarounds, but rather to simply reduce the material benefits of invading France.)

Similarly, I might offer reduced defense rates to manufacturers that would be willing to allow a small GPS device to be installed in the guts of their machinery, so that if it was removed to another country, it would no longer work. This device could also be included in cars and other items of value, so that they would either have to be used in France, or they could not be used at all.

Given that the control of bridges is a primary military objective, in order to facilitate the movement of troops and vehicles, I would also encourage the installation of particular devices in domestic cars and trucks, which would automatically keep access to bridges open. Thus invading armies would find their access to these bridges much harder, which would again slow down the speed of their invasion.

Furthermore, if invasion seemed imminent, I would arm and train as many citizens as possible. Any invading army would face a quite different challenge in a stateless society. If Germany invades Poland, how many citizens would risk their lives fighting against just another government? Whether a Polish leader taxes you, or a German one, makes relatively little difference – which is why your average citizen does not care much about who runs the local Mafia. Citizens of a stateless society, however, would be resisting an attempt to inflict taxation and a government upon them, and so would be far more willing to fight the kind of endlessly-draining insurgencies that we see so often in the annals of occupation.

These are just a few admittedly off-the-cuff ideas, but it is relatively easy to see how the benefits of invading France could be significantly diminished or even eliminated, while the costs of invading France could be significantly increased or made prohibitive.

The objection could be raised that some lunatic group could simply detonate a nuclear bomb somewhere inside France, for some insane or nefarious motive – but that is not an argument against private defense agencies, and for a statist society, but rather quite the reverse.

The “nuclear madman” argument is not solved by the existence of a government, since no government can protect against this eventuality – however, a free society would be far less likely to be the target of such an attack, since it would have a defensive military policy only, and not an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy, and thus would be infinitely less likely to provoke such a mad and genocidal retaliation. Switzerland, for instance, faces no real danger of having airplanes flown into buildings.

It is my belief that over time, the need for these proactive and defensive strategies would diminish, since the only thing that would really ever be needed is a few nuclear weapons as a deterrent – and even the need for these would diminish over time, since either the world itself would become stateless, thus eliminating the danger of war, or the statist societies would continue to attack each other only, for the reasons mentioned above, and the need to continually defend a stateless society would diminish.

Finally, let’s look at some of the illusions that we have about statist “protection” in history, as a demonstration of how we can critically evaluate an example of a statist function.

Statist National “Defense”: A Critical Example

Briefly put, “national defense” is the need for a government to protect citizens from aggression by other governments.

This is an interesting paradox, even beyond the obvious one of using a “government” to protect us from “governments.” If you were able to run a magic survey throughout history, which government do you think people would be most frightened of and enslaved by? Would it be (a), their local State or Lord, or (b), some State or Lord in some other country? What about ancient Rome – would it be the local rulers, who forced young Romans into military service for 20 years or more, or the Carthaginians? What about England in the Middle Ages? Were the peasants more alarmed by the crushing taxation and strangling mobility restrictions imposed by their local Lord, or was the King of France their primary concern? Let us stop in Russia during the 18th century, and ask the serfs: “Are you more frightened of the Tsar’s soldiers, or the German Kaiser?” Let us go to a US citizen of today, and demand to know: “Are you more frightened of foreign invaders taking over Washington, or of the fact that if you don’t pay half your income in taxes, your own government will throw you in jail?”

Of course, we have to look at the Second World War, which has had more propaganda thrown at it than any other single conflict. Didn’t the British government save the country from Germany? That is an interesting question. The British government got into WWI, helped impose the brutal Treaty of Versailles, then contributed to the boom-and-bust cycle of the 1920s, which destroyed the German middle class and aided Hitler’s rise to power. During the 1930s, the British government supported the growing aggression of Hitler through subsidies, loans and mealy-mouthed appeasement. Then, when everything had failed, it threw the bodies of thousands of young men at the German air force in the Battle of Britain. Finally, it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands more British citizens by defending Africa and invading France, rather than let Nazism collapse on its own – as it was bound to do, just as every tyranny has done throughout history. Can it really be said, then, that the British government protected its citizens throughout the first half of the 20th century? Millions killed, families shattered, the economy destroyed, half of Europe lost to Stalin, and China to Mao… Can we consider that a great success? I think not. Only States win wars – never citizens.

The fact of the matter is that we do not face threats to our lives and property from foreign governments, but rather from our own. The State will tell us that it must exist, at the very least, to protect us from foreign governments, but that is morally equivalent to the local Mafia don telling us that we have to pay him 50% of our income so that he can protect us from the Mafia in Paraguay. Are we given the choice to buy a gun and defend ourselves? Of course not. Who endangers us more – the local Mafia guy, or some guy in Paraguay we have never met that our local Mafia guy says just might want a piece of us? I know which chance I would take.

There is a tried-and-true method for resisting foreign occupation which does not require any government – which we can see being played out in our daily news. During the recent invasion, the US completely destroyed the Iraqi government, and now has total control over the people and infrastructure. And what is happening? They are being attacked and harried until they will just have to get out of the country – just as they had to do in Korea and Vietnam, and just as the USSR had to do in Afghanistan. The Iraqi insurgents do not have a government at all – any more than the Afghani fighters did in the 1980s.

Let’s look at the Iraqi conflict in a slightly different light. America was attacked on 9/11 because the American government had troops in Saudi Arabia, and because it caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through the Iraqi bombing campaign of the 1990s. Given that the US government provoked the attacks, how well were the innocent victims of 9/11 protected by their government? Even if we do not count the physical casualties of the war, given the massive national debt being run up to pay for the Iraq war, how well is the property of American citizens being protected? How much power would Bush have to wage war if he did not have the power to steal almost half the wealth of the entire country? The government does not need taxes in order to wage war; it wages war because it already has the power of taxation – and it uses the war to raise taxes, either on the current citizens through increases and inflation, or on future citizens through deficits.

This simple fact helps explain why there were almost no wars in Western Europe from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the start of World War One in 1914. This was largely because governments could not afford wars – but then they all got their very own Central Banks and were able to pave the bloody path to the Great War with printed money and deficit financing. World War One resulted from an increase in State power – and in turn swelled State power, and set the stage for the next war. Thus, the idea that we need to give governments the power to tax us in order to protect us is ludicrous – because it is taxation that gives governments the power to wage war.

For pacifist countries, this “war” may be a war on poverty, or illiteracy, or drugs, or for universal health care, or whatever. It does not matter. The moment a government takes the power – and moral “right” – to forcibly take money from citizens, the stage is set for the ever-growing power of the State.

The question then arises – how does a citizen keep his property and person safe? The first answer that I would give is another question, which is:

Which sector does more to protect you and your property – the public or the private?

Let’s look at the security mechanisms the private sector has introduced in just the past few decades:

• ATMs/credit cards (less need to carry cash);
• Cell phones (can always call for help);
• Call display (virtually eliminates harassing phone calls);
• Sophisticated home security systems;
• ID tracking tags;
• Credit card numeric security;
• Pepper spray;
• GPS;
• Security cameras;
• Anti-shoplifting devices;
• Secure online transactions;
• And much more…

What has the public sector done? Well, they shoot harmless drug users and seize their property. They will shoot you too, if you don’t pay the massive tax increases they demand. The police are virtually useless in property crimes – and many violent criminals are turned loose because the courts are too slow, or are put in “house arrest” because the prisons are too full of non-violent offenders.

So, who has most helped you secure your person and property over the past few decades? Your government, or your friendly local entrepreneurs? Those who have stepped in to protect you, or those who have doubled your taxes while letting criminals walk free? Have capitalist companies enraged foreigners to the point of terrorism? Of course not – the 9/11 terrorists attacked the World Trade Center (to protest the financing of the US government), the Pentagon, and the White House. They didn’t go for a Ford motor plant or a Apple store – and why would they? No one kills for iPhones. They kill to protest military power, which rests on public financing.

In summation, then, it makes about as much sense to rely on governments for security as it does to rely on the Mafia for “protection.” The Mafia is really just protecting you from itself, as are all governments. Any man who comes up to you and says: “I need to threaten your person and steal your property in order to protect your person and property,” is obviously either deranged, or not particularly interested, to say the least, in protecting your person and property. As long as we keep falling for the same old lies, we will forever be robbed blind for the sake of our supposed property rights, and sent to wage war against internal or external “enemies” so that those in power can further pick the pockets of those we leave behind.

Part 2: Reasoning

Introduction: The Six Questions

When considering statist objections to anarchic solutions, the six questions below are most useful.

1. Does the government actually solve the problem in question?

People often say that government courts “solve” the problem of injustice. However, these courts can take many years to render a verdict – and cost the plaintiff and defendant hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Government courts are also used to harass and intimidate, creating a “chilling effect” for unpopular opinions or groups. Thus I find it essential to question the embedded premises of statism:

• Do State armies actually defend citizens?
• Does State policing actually protect private property?
• Does State welfare actually solve the problem of poverty?
• Does the war on drugs actually solve the problem of addiction and crime?
• Do State prisons actually rehabilitate prisoners and reduce crime?

It can be very tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that the existing statist approach is actually a solution – but I try to avoid taking that for granted, since it is so rarely the case.

2. Can the criticism of the anarchic solution be equally applied to the statist solution?

One of the most common objections to a stateless society is the fear that a political monopoly could somehow emerge from a free market of competing justice agencies. In other words, anarchism is rejected because it contains the mere possibility of political monopoly. However, if political monopoly is such a terrible evil, then a statist society – which is founded on just such a political monopoly – must be rejected even more firmly, just as we would always choose the mere possibility of cancer over actually having cancer.

3. Is anarchy accepted as a core value in nonpolitical spheres?

In my last book, “Everyday Anarchy,” I pointed out the numerous spheres in society where anarchy is both valued and defended, such as dating, career choices, education and so on. If anarchy is dismissed as “bad” overall, then it also must be “bad” in these other spheres as well. Unless the person criticizing anarchy is willing to advocate for a Ministry of Dating, the value of anarchy in certain spheres must at least be recognized. Thus anarchy cannot be rejected as an overall negative – and its admitted value and productivity must at least be accepted as potentially valuable in other spheres as well.

4. Would the person advocating statism perform State functions himself?

Most of us recognize and accept the right to use violence in an extremity of self-defense. Those who support statism recognize that, in this realm, State police merely formalize a right that everyone already has, namely the right of self-defense. A policeman can use force to protect a citizen from being attacked, just as that citizen can use force himself. However, if someone argues that it is moral to use force to take money from people to pay for public schools, would he be willing to use this force himself? Would he be willing to go door to door with a gun to extract money for public schools? Would he be willing to extend this right to everyone in society? If not, then he has created two opposing ethical categories – the State police, to whom this use of violence is moral – and everyone else, to whom this use of violence is immoral. How can these opposing moral categories be justified?

5. Can something be both voluntary and coercive at the same time?

Everyone recognizes that an act cannot be both “rape” and “lovemaking” simultaneously. Rape requires force, because the victim is unwilling; lovemaking does not. Because no action can be both voluntary and coercive at the same time, statists cannot appeal to the principle of “voluntarism” when defending the violence of the State. Statists cannot say that we “agree” to be taxed, and then say that taxation must be coercive. If we agree to taxation, the coercion is unnecessary – if we do not agree to taxation, then we are coerced against our will.

6. Does political organization change human nature?

If people care enough about the poor to vote for state welfare programs, then they will care enough about the poor to fund private charities. If people care enough about the uneducated to vote for state schools, they will care enough to donate to private schools. Removing the State does not fundamentally alter human nature. The benevolence and wisdom that democracy relies on will not be magically transformed into cold selfishness the moment that the State ends. Statism relies on maturity and benevolence on the part of the voters, the politicians, and government workers. If this maturity and benevolence is not present, the State is a mere brutal tyranny, and must be abolished. If the majority of people are mature and benevolent – as I believe – then the State is an unnecessary overhead, and far too prone to violent injustices to be allowed to continue. In other words, people cannot be called “virtuous” only when it serves the statist argument, and then “selfish” when it does not.

There are a number of other principles, which are more specific to particular circumstances, but the six described above will show up repeatedly.

We will now take a quick tour through an overview of anarchism, and sketch in broad strokes the beginnings of our solutions to the horrors of worldwide violence.

Anarchism – Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t Anarchism ‘Bad’?

Unfortunately, the term has been degraded through mythology to mean “a world without rules” – usually garbed in post-apocalyptic outerwear and riding a well-armed motorbike. This is nonsense, of course. “Anarchy” is merely the logically consistent application of the moral premise that the initiation of the use of force is wrong. If violence is a bad way to solve problems, then the government is by definition immoral, since “government” always means a group of individuals who claim the right to initiate violence against everyone else, in the form of taxation, regulations etc.

But if there is no government, how can the inevitable conflicts in human society be resolved?

The most important thing in philosophy is to consistently question the premises of propositions. For instance, embedded in the above question is the premise that conflicts within human society are currently being resolved by governments. This is pure nonsense. Governments are agencies of force – governments do not persuade, governments do not reason, governments do not motivate, governments do not encourage, governments do not resolve disputes. Governments have no more power to create morality then rape has to create love. A gun is only useful in self-defense; it cannot be used to create virtue.

For somebody who is an anarchist, you sure do sound like a politician! Wasn’t that just a complete dodge of the question?

Excellent catch! Here is as good a place as any to introduce you to the concept of Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs). This concept cannot answer every conceivable question you might have about dispute resolutions within a stateless society, but rather is a framework for understanding the methodology of dispute resolution – just as the scientific method cannot answer every possible question about the natural world, but rather points towards a methodology that allows those questions to be answered in a rational manner.

DROs are companies that specialize in insuring contracts between individuals, and resolving any disputes that might arise. For instance, if I borrow $1,000 from you, I may have to pay $10 to a DRO to insure my loan. If I fail to pay you back your money, the DRO will pay you instead. Obviously, as my credit rating improves, the cost of insuring my contracts will decline.

The DRO theory can be as complex as any other free market theory – and a lot of intellectual effort has gone into resolving how particular transactions might occur, such as multimillion dollar international contracts. Credible DRO theories have also been advanced that solve problems ranging from abortion to child abuse to murder to pollution. For more on DRO theory and practice, please see “The Stateless Society: An Examination of Alternatives” below.

But what about the roads?

The most important thing to understand about anarchism is that it is a moral theory which cannot logically be judged by consequences alone. For instance, the abolition of slavery was a moral imperative, because slavery as an institution is innately evil. The abolition of slavery was not conditional upon the provision of jobs for every freed slave. In a similar manner, anarchic theory does not have to explain how every conceivable social, legal or economic transaction could occur in the absence of a coercive government. What is important to understand is that the initiation of the use of force is a moral evil. With that in mind, we can approach the problem of roads more clearly.

First of all, roads are currently funded through the initiation of force. If you do not pay the taxes which support road construction, you will get a stern letter from the government, followed by a court date, followed by policemen coming to your house if you do not appear and submit to the court’s judgment. If you use force to defend yourself against the policemen who are breaking into your home, you will very likely be shot down.

The roads, in other words, are built at the point of a gun. The use of violence is the central issue, not what might potentially happen in the absence of violence.

That having been said, roads will be built by housing developers, mall builders, those constructing schools and towns – just as they were before governments took them over in the 19^th century. For more on this, please see the section on “Roads” below.

Okay – here’s a scenario for you: a guy builds a road that completely encircles a suburban neighborhood, and then charges $1 million for anyone to cross that road. Isn’t he holding everyone who lives in that neighborhood hostage?

This is fundamentally impossible. First of all, no one is going to buy a house in a neighborhood unless they are contractually guaranteed access to roads. Thus it will be impossible for anyone to completely encircle the neighborhood. Secondly, even if it were possible, it would be a highly risky investment. Can you imagine going to investors with a business plan that said: “I’m going to try to buy all the land that surrounds the neighborhood, and then charge exorbitant rates for anyone to cross that land.” No sane investor would give you the money for such a plan. The risk of failure would be too great, and no DRO would enforce any contract that was so destructive, unpopular and economically unfeasible. DROs, unlike governments, must be appealing to the general population. If a DRO got involved with the encircling and imprisonment of a neighborhood, it would become so unpopular that it would lose far more business than it could potentially gain.

All right, smarty-pants – what about this: the company that supplies water to a neighborhood suddenly decides to increase its rates Tenfold – people are going to be forced to pay the exorbitant price, right?

First of all, if you are so concerned about people paying increasingly exorbitant prices for services, then it scarcely seems logical to propose the government as the solution to that problem! Taxes have risen immensely over the past 30 years, while services have declined.

However, even if we accept the premise of the problem, it is easily solved in a stateless society. First of all, no one will buy a house in a neighborhood without a contractual obligation that requires the supply of water at reasonable rates. Secondly, if the water company starts charging exorbitant prices, another company will simply move in and supply water in another form – in barrels, bottles or whatever. Thus, raising prices permanently costs the water company its customers – and makes every potential customer back away, for fear that the same predation will happen to them. Investors will quickly realize that the water company is shooting itself in the foot, and will align themselves with other shareholders, resulting in a takeover of the price-gouging water company, and a reduction in rates, accompanied by rank apologies and base groveling. Given that this result will be known in advance, no CEO would be allowed to pursue such a self-destructive course. Only governments that can be manipulated by corporations to prevent competition truly endanger consumers.

Okay – what if two DROs have different rules – isn’t that just going to result in endless civil war?

First of all, it is unlikely that DROs would have wildly different rules, because that would be economically inefficient. Cell phone companies use similar protocols, so that they can interoperate with each other. Railroad companies tend to use the same gauge, so that trains can travel as widely as possible. Internet service providers exchange data with other service providers, passing e-mails and other data back and forth. Like evolution, the free market is more about cooperation than pure competition. If a DRO wants to create a new rule, that rule will be fairly useless unless other DROs are willing to cooperate with it – just as a new e-mail program is fairly useless unless it uses existing protocols. This need for interoperability with other DROs will inevitably keep the number of new rules to the most economically efficient minimum. Customers will prefer DROs with broader reciprocity agreements, just as they prefer credit cards that are valid in a large number of locations.

New rules will also add to the costs for DRO subscribers – and if it costs them more money than it saves, the DRO will lose business.

But – won’t the most successful DRO just arm itself, violently eliminate all the other DROs, and emerge as a new government?

First of all, if the potential emergence of a new government at some point in the future is of great concern, then surely the elimination of existing governments in the present is a worthy goal. If we have cancer, we go through chemotherapy to eliminate it in the present, even though we may get cancer again at some point in the future.

Secondly, unlike governments, DROs are not violent institutions. DROs will be primarily populated by white-collar workers: accountants, mediators, executives and so on. DROs are about as likely to become paramilitary organizations as your average accounting firm is likely to become an elite squad of ninja death warriors. Given the current existence of governments that possess nuclear weapons, I for one am willing to take that risk.

Thirdly, if a DRO tries to turn itself into a government, the other DROs will certainly act to prevent it. DROs would simply refuse to cooperate with any DRO that refused to submit to “arms inspections.” Furthermore, DRO customers would also not take very kindly to their DRO becoming an armed institution – and their rates would certainly skyrocket, because their DRO would have to provide its regular services, as well as pay for all those black helicopters and RPGs. Any DRO that was paying for goods or services that its customers did not want – i.e. an army – would very quickly go out of business, because it would not be competitive in terms of rates. For more on this, please see “War, Profit and the State” below.

Are There Any Examples Of Anarchic Societies Being Successful In The Past?

There are, but that is not the essential question. Again, the essential aspect of anarchic theory is the moral rule banning the initiation of the use of force. Anarchists advocate a stateless society because governments are evil. When slavery was abolished for the first time in human history, there was no prior example of a successful slave–free society — if that had been a requirement, then slavery would be with us still.

That having been said, I can confidently point towards a nonviolent society that you’re intimately aware of – you. I am guessing that you do not use violence directly to achieve your aims. It seems likely to me that you did not hold your employer hostage until you got your job; I also doubt that you keep your spouse locked in the basement, or that you threaten to shoot your “friends” if they do not join you on the dance floor. In other words, you are the perfect example of a stateless society. All of your personal relationships are voluntary, and do not involve the use of force. You are an anarchic microcosm – to see how a stateless society works, all you have to do is look in the mirror.

How can a society without a government pay for national defense?

Many people, when first hearing the concept of a stateless society, cannot imagine how collective defense could possibly be paid for in the absence of taxation. I have already briefly discussed this above – here are some more details.

This is an important question to ask, but there is a way of answering it that also answers many other questions about collective action.

In any society, there are four possibilities that can occur in the realm of collective defense. The first is that no one wants to pay for collective defense. The second is that only a minority of people want to pay for collective defense; the third is that the majority of people want to pay for collective defense; and the fourth is that everyone wants to pay for collective defense.

Let’s compare how these four possibilities play out in a state-based democracy:

1. No one wants to pay for collective defense. In this case, voters will universally reject any politician who proposes collective defense of any kind.
2. Only a minority of people want to pay for collective defense. In this case, no politician who proposes paying for collective defense will ever get into office, because he will never secure a majority of the votes.
3. The majority of people want to pay for collective defense. In this case, pro-defense politicians will be voted into office, and spend tax money on defense.
4. Everyone wants to pay for collective defense. This achieves the same outcome as number three.

Thus, all other things being equal, a democracy produces almost the same outcome as a stateless society – with the important exception of #2. If only a minority of people want to pay for defense, they cannot do so in a democracy, but can do so in a stateless society.

In a stateless society, if the majority of people are interested in paying for collective defense, it will be paid for. The addition of the government to the interaction is entirely superfluous – the equivalent of creating a Ministry devoted to communicating the pleasures of candy to children, or sex to teenagers.

However, the possibility exists that people are willing to pay for collective defense only if they know that everyone else is paying for it as well. This argument fails on multiple levels, both empirical and rational.

1. People tip waiters and give to charity, even though they know that some people never do.
2. There is no reason why, in a stateless society, people should not have full knowledge of who has donated to collective defense. Agencies providing collective defense could easily issue a “donor card,” which certain shops or employers might ask to see before doing business. Names of donors could also be put on a website, easily searchable, creating social pressures to donate.
3. When the money required for collective defense is stripped from taxpayers at the point of a gun, a basic moral tenet – and rational criterion – is violated. Citizens institute collective defense in order to protect their property – it makes no sense whatsoever to create an agency to protect property rights and then invest that agency with the power to violate property rights at will.
4. When collective defense is paid for by the initiation of the use of force, there is no rational ceiling to costs, and no incentive for efficiency – thus ensuring that costs will escalate to the point where they become unsustainable, causing a collapse of the economic system and leaving the country vulnerable.

What about education?

The question of education follows the same pattern as the question of collective defense outlined above. However, there are certain additional pieces of information that can strengthen the case for a free market in education.

First of all, it is important understand that State education was not imposed because children were not being educated. Prior to the institution of government-run education, the functional literacy rate of the average American was over 90% – far better than it is now, after hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent “educating” children. Before the government forcefully took over the schools, there was almost no violence in schools, there were no school shootings, no violent gangs, no assaults on teachers – and it did not take more than two decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a reasonably-educated adult. Most of the intellectual giants of the 18^th and 19^th centuries – the Founding Fathers included – did not even finish high school, let alone go to college.

Government education in America was instituted as a means of cultural control, due to rising tribal fears about the growing number of non-Protestants in society – the “immigrant issue” of the time.

There are a number of core reasons that government education cripples children’s minds; for the sake of brevity, we will deal with only one here.

It is reasonable to assume that the majority of parents want to give their children a good education – and this education must necessarily include the teaching of values, or the relationship between personal ethics and real-world choices. In any multicultural society, however, a common curriculum cannot include any fundamental values, for fear of offending various groups. Thus values must be stripped from education, turning its focus to rote memorization, bland technical skills (geometry, sports, wood shop), and neutral and propagandistic views of society and politics (“Democracy is good!” “Respect multiculturalism!” “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!”). This effectively kills the energetic curiosity of the young, turns school into a mind-numbing series of empty exercises, creates frustration among those needing stimulation, and engenders deep disrespect for the educational system – and its teachers – who remain institutionally indifferent to the welfare of the students. Combine this hostility and frustration with the easy money available through drug sales – and the possibility of surviving on welfare – and entire generations of youths become mentally crippled. The costs of this are beyond calculation, since the damage goes far beyond economics.

Yes, but how will poor children get an education if it is not paid for through taxes?

This reminds me of the old Soviet cartoon – two old women are standing in an endless line-up to buy bread. One says to the other: “What a terribly long line!” The other replies: “Yes, but just imagine – in the capitalist countries, the government doesn’t even distribute the bread!”

Whenever I argue for a stateless society, I say: “The government should not provide ‘X’.” The response always comes back: “But how will ‘X’ then be provided?”

As mentioned above, the answer is simple: “Since everybody is concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.” In other words, since everyone is concerned that poor children might not get an education because it costs too much, those children will be provided an education as a direct result of everyone’s concern.

Look, either you will help poor children get an education, through charity or volunteering, or you will not. If you will help poor children get an education, you do not have to worry about the issue. If you will do nothing to help poor children get an education, it is pure hypocrisy to raise it as an issue that you claim to be concerned about.

That having been said, there are a number of ways that a free society can provide education that is far superior to the mess being inflicted on children now.

First of all, poor children are not currently getting any sort of decent education. The perceived risks of a stateless society cannot be rationally compared to a perfect situation in the here-and-now. Those most concerned with the education of the poor should be the ones most clamouring for the abolishment of the existing system. The educational statistics for poor children are absolutely appalling – and this should raise the urgency of finding a solution. It is one thing to say, “You should never cross a road against the lights, even if there is no traffic.” It is quite another thing to say, “You should never cross a road against the lights, even if you are being chased by a lion!” Those who oppose a stateless society always ignore the existence of the lion, thus adding their intellectual inertia to the weight of the status quo.

Secondly, much like the question of collective defense, the cost of education will be far lower in a free society. The $10,000-$15,000 a year currently being spent per-pupil in public schools is ridiculously overinflated. Year-round accelerated education would help the child graduate several years earlier – and with tangible job skills to boot! The resulting increase in earnings would more than pay for the education – and many companies would scramble to offer loans to such children, knowing that they would be paid off soon after graduation. Thus education would be more beneficial – and, since there would be no war on drugs or automatic “welfare” in a free society, fewer self-destructive options would be available.

As for higher education, it is either recreational or vocational. If it is recreational, then it is about as necessary as a hobby, and cannot be considered a necessity. If it is vocational, such as medicine, then additional earnings will more than pay for the costs of the education. Businesses need accountants – thus those businesses will be more than happy to fund the college expenses of talented youngsters in return for a work commitment after graduation. (This is how my father received his doctorate.)

Talented but poor children will be sought after by schools, both for the benevolence they can show by subsidizing them, and also because high-quality graduates raise the prestige of a school, enabling it to increase fees.

In a stateless society, a tiny minority of poor children may slip through the cracks – but that is far better than the current situation, where most poor children slip through the cracks. The fact that some non-smokers will get lung cancer does not mean that we should encourage people to smoke. A stateless society is not a utopia, it is merely a utopia compared to a government society.

Now, we shall really begin to make the case for anarchism by examining the question of whether the government is a valid moral entity.

Disproving the State: Four Arguments Against Government

Two objections constantly tend to recur whenever the subject of dissolving the State arises. The first is that a free society is only possible if people are perfectly good or rational. In other words, citizens need a centralized State because there are evil people in the world.

The first and most obvious problem with this position is that if evil people exist in society, they will also exist within the State – and be far more dangerous thereby. Citizens are able to protect themselves against evil individuals, but stand no chance against an aggressive State armed to the teeth with police and military might. Thus, the argument that we need the State because evil people exist is false. If evil people exist, the State must be dismantled, since evil people will be drawn to use its power for their own ends – and, unlike private thugs, evil people in government have the police and military to inflict their whims on a helpless and largely disarmed population.

Logically, there are four possibilities as to the mixture of good and evil people in the world:

1. That all men are moral;
2. That all men are immoral;
3. That the majority of men are moral, and a minority immoral;
4. That the majority of men are immoral, and a minority moral.

(A perfect balance of good and evil is statistically impossible.)

In the first case, (all men are moral), the State is obviously unnecessary, since evil does not exist.

In the second case, (all men are immoral), the State cannot be permitted to exist for one simple reason. The State, it is generally argued, must exist because there are evil people in the world who desire to inflict harm, and who can only be restrained through fear of State retribution (police, prisons etc). A corollary of this argument is that the less retribution these people fear, the more evil they will do. However, the State itself is not subject to any force, but is a law unto itself. Even in Western democracies, how many policemen and politicians go to jail? Thus if evil people wish to do harm but are only restrained by force, then society can never permit a State to exist, because evil people will immediately take control of that State, in order to do evil and avoid retribution. In a society of pure evil, then, the only hope for stability would be a state of nature, where a general arming and fear of retribution would blunt the evil intents of disparate groups.

The third possibility is that most people are evil, and only a few are good. If this is the case, then the State also cannot be permitted to exist, since the majority of those in control of the State will be evil, and will rule over the good minority. Democracy in particular cannot be permitted to exist, since the minority of good people would be subjugated to the democratic will of the evil majority. Evil people, who wish to do harm without fear of retribution, would inevitably take control of the State, and use its power to do their evil free of that fear. Good people act morally because they love virtue and peace of mind, not because they fear retribution – and thus, unlike evil people, they have little to gain by controlling the State. And so it is certain that the State will be controlled by a majority of evil people who will rule over all, to the detriment of all moral people.

The fourth option is that most people are good, and only a few are evil. This possibility is subject to the same problems outlined above, notably that evil people will always want to gain control over the State, in order to shield themselves from retaliation. This option changes the appearance of democracy, of course: because the majority of people are good, evil power-seekers must lie to them in order to gain power, and then, after achieving public office, will immediately break faith and pursue their own corrupt agendas, enforcing their wills with the police and military. (This is the current situation in democracies, of course.) Thus the State remains the greatest prize to the most evil men, who will quickly gain control over its awesome power – to the detriment of all good souls – and so the State cannot be permitted to exist in this scenario either.

It is clear, then, that there is no situation under which a State can logically or morally be allowed to exist. The only possible justification for the existence of a State would be if the majority of men are evil, but all the power of the State is always controlled by a minority of good men. This situation, while interesting theoretically, breaks down logically because:

1. The evil majority would quickly outvote the minority or overpower them through a coup;
2. Because there is no way to ensure that only good people would always run the State; and,
3. There is absolutely no example of this having ever occurred in any of the dark annals of the brutal history of the State.

The logical error always made in the defense of the State is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of citizens are evil, then at least 50% of the people ruling over them are also evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of the State. If there is no evil, the State is unnecessary. If evil exists, the State is far too dangerous to be allowed existence.

Why is this error always made? There are a number of reasons, which can only be touched on here. The first is that the State introduces itself to children in the form of public school teachers who are considered moral authorities. Thus is the association of morality and authority with the State first made, and is reinforced through years of repetition. The second is that the State never teaches children about the root of its power – force – but instead pretends that it is just another social institution, like a business or a church or a charity. The third is that the prevalence of religion has always blinded men to the evils of the State – which is why the State has always been so interested in furthering the interests of churches. In the religious world-view, absolute power is synonymous with perfect goodness, in the form of a deity. In the real political world of men, however, increasing power always means increasing evil. With religion, also, all that happens must be for the good – thus, fighting encroaching political power is fighting the will of the deity. There are many more reasons, of course, but these are among the deepest.

I mentioned at the beginning of this section that people generally make two errors when confronted with the idea of dissolving the State. The first is believing that the State is necessary because evil people exist. The second is the belief that, in the absence of a State, any social institutions which arise will inevitably take the place of the State. Thus, Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs), insurance companies and private security forces are all considered potential cancers which will swell and overwhelm the body politic.

This view arises from the same error outlined above. If all social institutions are constantly trying to grow in power and enforce their wills on others, then by that very argument a centralized State cannot be allowed to exist. If it is an iron law that groups always try to gain power over other groups and individuals, then that power-lust will not end if one of them wins, but will spread across society until slavery is the norm.

It is also very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that has already overpowered us. It is similar to the statist argument about private monopolies – that citizens should create a State monopoly because they are afraid of a private monopoly.

Once we begin to reason away the fogs of propaganda, it does not take keen vision to see through such nonsense.

Anarchy, Violence and the State

Does more government equal less violence?

Another common objection to a stateless society is that violence will inevitably increase in the absence of a centralized State. This is a very interesting objection, and seems to arise from people who have imbibed a large amount of propaganda about the nature and function of the State. It seems hard to imagine that this conclusion could ever be reached by reasoning from first principles, as we will see below.

There are several circumstances under which the use of violence will either increase, or decrease – and they tend to correspond with the basic principles of economics. For instance, people tend to respond to incentives, and tend to be drawn to circumstances under which they can gain the most resources by expending the least effort. Thus in the lottery system, people respond to the incentive of the million dollar payout by expending minimal resources in the purchase of a ticket.

There are several circumstances under which violence will tend to increase, rather than decrease – and interestingly enough, a centralized State creates and exacerbates all such circumstances.

Principle 1: Risk

Economically speaking, risk is the great balancer of reward. If a horse is less likely to win a race, the gambling payout must be higher in order to induce people to bet on it. By their very nature, speculative investments must potentially produce greater rewards than blue-chip stocks. Similarly, white-collar criminals generally face less physical risk than muggers. A stick-up man may inadvertently run up against a judo expert, and find the tables turned very quickly – while a hacker siphoning off funds electronically faces no such risk. In general, those interested in stealing property will always gravitate toward situations where the risks of retaliation are lower.

If force or the threat thereof is required for the theft – as in the case of taxes – one of the greatest ways of reducing the possibilities of retaliation is through the principle of overwhelming force. If five enormous muggers circle a 98 pound man and demand his wallet, the possibilities of retaliation are far lower than if the 98 pound man approaches five enormous men and demands that they surrender their wallets.

Clearly, the existence of a centralized State creates such an enormous disparity of power that resistance against government predations is, in all practicality, impossible. A man can either stand up to or move away from the Mafia, but can do almost nothing to oppose expansions of State power.

Thus, we can see that the existence of a centralized State creates the following problems with regards to violence:

1. The use of violence tends to increase when the risks of using that violence decrease;
2. The risks of initiating violence tend to decrease as the disparity of power increases;
3. There is no greater disparity of power than that between a citizen and his government;
4. Therefore there is no better way to increase the use of violence than to create a centralized political state.

Principle 2: Proximity

Using violence is a brutal and horrible task for most people. Most people are not physically or mentally equipped to use violence, either due to a lack of physical strength, a lack of martial knowledge, or an absence of sociopathic tendencies. However, the government has enormous, relatively efficient and well-distributed systems in place to initiate the use of force against largely disarmed citizens. Thus, those who wish to gain the fruits of violence can do so by tapping into the government’s network of enforcers, without ever having to directly witness or deploy violence themselves.

It can generally be said that the use of violence tends to increase as the visibility and proximity of violence decreases. In other words, if you can get other people to do your dirty work, more dirty work will tend to get done. If everyone who wished to gain the fruits of State violence had to hold their own guns to everyone’s heads, almost all of them would end up refraining from such direct and dangerous brutality.

Thus in the realm of proximity as well, the existence of a centralized State tends to both distance and hide the reality of violence from those who wish to pluck the fruits of violence – thus ensuring that the use of violence will tend to increase.

Principle 3: Externalization of Costs

In a stateless society, it is impossible to “outsource” violence to the police or the military, since they are not funded through collective coercion. When there is a government, however, those who wish to gain the fruits of violence – i.e. tax revenues, the regulation of competitors, the blocking of imports and so on – can lobby the government to enforce such beneficial restrictions on the free trade and choices of others. They will have to pay for this lobbying effort, but they will not have to directly fund the police and the military and the court system and the prison guards in order to force people to obey their whims. This “externalization of costs” is an essential ingredient in the expansion of the use of violence.

For instance, imagine you are a steel manufacturer who wants to block the imports of steel from other countries – how expensive would it be to build your own navy, your own radar system, your own Coast Guard, hire your own inspectors and so on? How would you convince all the shippers and dock owners and transporters to inspect every container on your behalf? Would you pay them? Would you threaten them? And even if you found it economically advantageous to do all that, could you guarantee that none of your competitors would do the same? Would it still be economically advantageous if you ended up getting into an arms race with all of your fellow manufacturers? And what if your customers found out that you were using your own private militia to block the imports of steel – might they not take offense at your use of violence and boycott you? No, in the absence of a centralized State that you can offload all the enforcement costs to, it is going to be far cheaper for you to compete openly than develop your own private, overwhelming and universal army.

Thus, in any situation where the costs of using violence can be externalized to some centralized agency, the use of that violence will always tend to increase. Offloading the costs of violence to taxpayers will always make violence profitable to specific agencies – whether private or public. And so, once again, we can see that the existence of the State will always tend to increase the use of violence.

Principle 4: Deferment

How much do you think you would spend if you knew that you would be long-dead when the bill came due? This is, of course, the basic principle of deficit financing – the deferment of payments to the next generation – which is perhaps the most insidious form of taxation. Forcibly transferring property from those who have not even been born yet is perhaps the greatest “externalization” of costs that can be imagined! Naturally, the risks of retaliation from the unborn are utterly nonexistent – and neither is any direct violence performed against them. Thus the principle of “deferment” is perhaps one of the greatest ways in which the existence of a centralized State increases the use of violence.

Principle 5: Propaganda

It is well known in totalitarian regimes that in order to get people to accept the use of violence, that violence must always be reframed in a noble light. Government violence can never be referred to as merely the use of brute force for the material gain of politicians and bureaucrats – it must always represent the manifestation of core social or cultural values, such as caring for the poor, the sick, the old, or the indigent. The violence must always be tucked away from direct view, and the effects of violence elevated to sentimental heights of soaring rhetoric. Furthermore, the effects of the withdrawal of violence must always be portrayed as catastrophic and evil. Thus the elimination of the welfare state would cause mass starvation; the elimination of medical subsidies would cause mass death; the elimination of the war on drugs would cause massive addictions and social collapse – and the elimination of the State itself would directly create a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk nightmare world of brutal and endlessly warring gangs.

Propaganda is different from advertising in that all that advertising can ever do is get you to try a product for the first time – if the quality of the product does not meet your needs or expectations, then you will simply never buy that product again. Propaganda, on the other hand, is quite different. Advertising appeals to choice and self-interest; propaganda uses rhetoric to morally justify the absence of choice and self-interest. Advertising can only stimulate a one-time demand; propaganda permanently suppresses rationality. Advertising generally uses the argument from effect (you will be better off); propaganda always uses the argument from morality (you are evil for doubting).

The private funding of propaganda is never economically viable, since the amount of time and energy required to instill propaganda in the mind of the average person is far too great to justify its cost. In a voluntary system like the free market, paying for year after year of propaganda (which can only result in a “first time” purchase of a good or service) is never worth it. Propaganda is only “worth it” when it can be used to keep people passive within a coercive system like State taxation or regulation. For instance, here in Canada, socialized medicine is always called a “core Canadian value,” and can be subject to no rational, moral or economic analysis. (Of course, if it really were a “core Canadian value,” we would scarcely need the State to enforce it!) Because the existing system is so terrible, it takes years of State propaganda – primarily directed at children – to overcome people’s actual experiences of the endless disasters of socialized medicine. Propaganda is always required where people would never voluntarily choose the situation that the propaganda is praising. Thus we need endless propaganda extolling the virtues of the welfare state, the war on drugs and socialized medicine, while the virtues of eating chocolate cake are left for us to discover and maintain on our own.

Government propaganda is primarily aimed at children through State schools, and usually takes the form of an absence of topics. The coercive nature of the State is never mentioned, of course, and neither are the financial benefits which accrue to those who control the State. Children do hear endlessly about how the State protects the environment, feeds the poor and heals the sick. This propaganda blinds people to the true nature of State violence – thus ensuring that State violence can increase with relatively little or no opposition.

Parents are forced to pay for the propaganda of public schools through taxation. Thus a ghastly situation is created wherein the taxpayers are forced to pay for their own indoctrination – and the indoctrination of their children. This “externalization of cost” is perhaps the greatest tool that the government uses to ensure that increasing State violence will be subject to little or no opposition or rational analysis. No corporation or private agency could possibly profit from a 14-year program of indoctrinating children – the State, however, by inflicting the costs of indoctrination onto parents, creates a situation where the slaves are forced to pay for their own manacles. And as we all know, when slaves don’t resist, owning slaves becomes economically far more viable.

For the above reasons, it is clear that the existence of a centralized State vastly increases both the profits and the prevalence of violence. The fact that the violence is masked by obedience in no way diminishes the brutality of coercion. All moralists interested in one of the greatest topics of ethics – the reduction or elimination of violence – would do well to understand the depth and degree to which the existence of a centralized State promotes, exacerbates – and profits from – violence. Private violence is a negative but manageable situation – however, as we can see from countless examples throughout history, public violence always escalates until civil society becomes seriously threatened. Because the State so directly profits from violence, eliminating the State can in no way increase the use of violence within society. Quite the contrary – since private agencies do not profit from violence, eliminating the State will, to a degree unprecedented in human history, eliminate violence as well.

War, Profit and the State

It has often been said that war is the health of the State – but the argument could also be made that the reverse is more true: that the State is the health of war. In other words, that war – the greatest of all human evils – is impossible without the State.

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was once asked what the central defining characteristic of the free market was – i.e. since every economy is more or less a mixture of freedom and State compulsion, what institution truly separated a free market from a controlled economy – and he replied that it was the existence of a stock market. Through a stock market, entrepreneurs can achieve the externalization of risk, or the partial transfer of potential losses from themselves to investors. In the absence of this capacity, business growth is almost impossible.

In other words, when risk is reduced, demand increases. The stagnation of economies in the absence of a stock market is testament to the unwillingness of individuals to take on all the risks of an economic endeavour themselves, even if this were possible. When risk becomes sharable, new possibilities emerge that were not present before – the Industrial Revolution being perhaps the most dramatic example.

Sadly, one of those possibilities – in all its horror, corruption, brutality and genocide – is war. In this section, I will endeavour to show that, in its capacity to reduce the costs and risks of violence, the State is, in effect, the stock market of war.

All economists know the “fallacy of the broken window,” which is that the stimulation of demand caused by a vandal breaking a window does not add to economic growth, but rather subtracts from it, since the money spent replacing the window is deducted from other possible purchases. This is self-evident to all of us – we don’t try to increase our incomes by driving our cars off cliffs or burning down our houses. Although it might please car manufacturers and home builders, it neither pleases us, nor the people who would have had access to the new car and house if we did not need them for ourselves. Destruction always diverts resources and so bids up prices, which costs everyone.

(In fact, breaking a $100 window removes more than $100 from the economy, since all the time spent returning the window to its original state – calling the window repairman, deciding on the replacement, cleaning up the shards of glass, etc – is also subtracted from the economy as a whole.)

There will always be accidents, of course, and so repairs are a legitimate aspect of any free market. However, war can never be said to be an accident, is never part of the free market, and yet is commonly believed to be good for the economy – and must be, for at least some people, since it is pursued so often. How can these opposites be reconciled? How can destruction be economically advantageous, when it is so obviously bad for the economy as a whole?

We can imagine an unethical window repairman who smashes windows in order to raise demand for his business. This would certainly help his income – and yet we see that this course is almost never pursued in real life in the free market. Why not?

One obvious answer could be that business managers are afraid of going to jail – and that certainly is a risk, but not a very great one. Arsonists are notoriously hard to catch, for instance, and there are so many hard-to-trace sabotages that can be undertaken. Poison can be added to the water supply that would incriminate a water supplier, which would take months to resolve – at which point the trail would be long cold. Foreign hackers could be paid to infiltrate competitor’s networks, or mount denial-of-service attacks on their web sites – sure doom for those who sell over the Internet.

Not convinced? Well, what about eBay? If you have a competitor who is taking away your business, why not just get a hundred of your closest friends to give him a bad rating, and watch his reputation – and business – dry up and blow away?

All of the above practices are very rare in the free market, for three main reasons. The first is that they are costly; the second is that they increase risks, and the third is the fear of retaliation.

The Cost of Destruction

If you want to hire an arsonist to torch the factory of your competitor, you have to become an expert in underworld negotiations. You might pay an arsonist and watch him take off to Hawaii instead of setting the fire. You also face the risk that your arsonist will take your offer to your competitor and ask for more money to not set the fire – or, worse, return the favor and torch your factory! It will certainly cost money to start down the road of vandalism, and there is no guarantee that your investment will pay off in the way you want.

There are other tertiary costs to pursuing a path of “competition by destruction.” You can only target one competitor at a time, which is only partially helpful, since most businesses face many competitors simultaneously – some local, and some overseas and probably out of reach. Even if you are successful in destroying your competitor, you have opened a “hole” in the market, which will just invite others to come in – and perhaps compete even more fiercely with you. When it comes to competition, in most cases it is better to stay with “the devil you know.” It wouldn’t make much sense to knock out a small software competitor, for instance, and end up giving Microsoft a good reason to enter the market.

Also, if you are a business owner, competition is very good for you. Just as a sports team gets lazy and unskilled if it never plays a competent opponent, businesses without competition get unproductive, lazy and inefficient – a sure invitation to others to come in and compete. Successful businesses need competition to stay fit. Resistance breeds strength.

Also, what happens if you do manage to successfully sabotage your opponents? If you do it well, no one has any idea that you are behind the sudden spate of arson. What happens to your insurance costs? They go through the roof – if you can even get any! Furthermore, you will not be able to meet all the new demand right away, thus ensuring that clients will find alternatives, which will likely remain outside your control. Thus you have increased your costs, created incentives for potential customers to find alternatives and alarmed your employees – creating a dangerous situation where competitors are highly motivated to enter your field just when you are the most vulnerable to competition! Overall, not a very bright idea!

The Risks of Destruction

Let us say you decide to pay a man named Stan to torch your competitor’s factory – well, the basic reality of the transaction is that Stan, as a professional arsonist, knows how to work the situation to his advantage far better than you do, since you are, ahem, new to the field. Stan knows that no matter what he does, you cannot go to the police for protection. What if he tapes your conversations and then blackmails you? Then your exercise in amoral competition suddenly becomes a lifelong nightmare of expense, guilt, fear and rage.

As mentioned above, what if Stan decides to go to your competitor and reveal your plans? Surely your competitor would pay good money for that information, since he could then go to the police and destroy you legally even more completely than you were hoping to destroy him illegally. A basic fact of criminal activity is that once the gloves come off, the results become very hard to predict indeed!

What if Stan goes to your competitor and says: “For $25,000, I was supposed to torch this place – for $30,000 I can just turn around and set quite a different fire!” This pendulum bidding war can turn into a desperately stressful money-loser for everyone concerned (except Stan, of course).

And who is to say that Stan is even a “legitimate” arsonist? What if he is an undercover agent of some kind? What if he has been sent by someone else in order to get some dirt on you? What if it turns out to be blackmail, or a set-up by your competitor? How would you know? Again – it is all very risky!

The Risks of Personal Retaliation

Let us say that all of the above works out just the way you want it and Stan actually torches your competitor Bill’s factory – what might happen then? You have just created a bitter enemy who suspects foul play, knows that you have a good motive for torching his factory, and has nothing to lose. He might complain about you to the police, hire private investigators and put an ad in every local paper offering a cash reward of a million dollars for information leading to proof of your participation – so he can sue you and recover far more than a million dollars!

Either your new enemy will find out actionable information, and then go to the police, or he will find out unactionable information – hints, not proof – in which case he may choose to retaliate against you. Since you’ve been able to do it in a way that cannot be proven – and he now knows how – you have just educated a bitter and angry man on how to torch a factory and escape detection. Are you going to sleep safe in your bed? Are you sure that he’s going to target only your factory?

What does all this look like in terms of economic calculation? Have a look at a sample table below showing the costs and benefits of competition through arson. If we assign arson a cost of $50k, with a 50% probability of success, and a resulting economic benefit of $1m, we see a net benefit of $450k (50% of $1m – $50k in costs). So far so good. But if we include a 10% risk of blackmail, a 20% chance of retaliation, a 25% chance of increased competition – all reasonable numbers – and finally $100k in increased insurance and security costs – we can see that the economic benefits are erased very quickly (see below).

Action	Cost	Probability	Economic Effect	Net Benefits (benefit / risk – cost)
Arson	-$50k	50%	$1 mill	$450k
Blackmail	-$250k	10%	-$250k	-$25k
Retaliation	-$1 mill	20%	-$1 mill	-$200k
Increased Competition	-$500k	25%	-$500k	-$125k
Increased Costs  (insurance, security)	-$100k	100%	-$100k	-$100k
			Net Effect	$0

(Note that the above table only shows the economic calculations – these do not include the emotional factors of guilt, fear and worry, which are of great significance but hard to quantify. This is important because even if the above numbers were less disagreeable, the emotional barrier would still have to be overcome.)

As the above conservative example shows, it is not really worth it to attempt economic gain through the destruction of property – and that is exactly how it should be. We want people to be good, of course, but we also want strong economic incentives for virtue as well, to shore up the uncertain integrity of free will!

How does this relate to war and the State? Very closely, in fact – but with very opposite effects.

The Economics of War

The economics of war are, at bottom, very simple, and contain three major players: those who decide on war, those who profit from war, and those who pay for war. Those who decide on war are the politicians, those who profit from it are those who supply military materials or are paid for military skills, and those who pay for war are the taxpayers. (The first and second groups, of course, overlap.)

In other words, a corporation which profits from supplying arms to the military is paid through a predation on citizens through State taxation – and under no other circumstances could the transaction exist, since the risks associated with destruction outlined above are equal to or greater than any profits that could be made.

Certainly if those who decided on war also paid for it, there would be no such thing as war, since war follows the same economic incentives and costs outlined above.

However, those who decide on war do not pay for it – that unpleasant task is relegated to the taxpayers (both current, in the form of direct taxes and inflation, and future, in the form of national debts).

Let us see how the above analysis of the costs of destruction changes when the State enters the equation.

The Costs of Military Destruction

If you want to start a war, you need a very expensive military – which must also be trained and maintained when there is no war. There is simply no way to recover the costs of that military by invading another country – otherwise, the free market would directly fund armies and invasions, which it never does. Or, if you would prefer another way of looking at it, you can only invade another country by destroying large portions of it, killing many of its citizens, and then fighting endless insurgencies. Given the costs of invasions and occupations – always in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars – what profits could conceivably be extracted from the bombed-out country you are occupying? That would be like asking a thief to make money by fire-bombing a house he wanted to steal from, and then staying and keeping the occupants hostage. Madness! Thieves don’t operate that way – and neither would war, without the presence of the State and the money of the taxpayers.

Since the taxpayer’s money pays for the war, the costs of destruction for those who start the war are very low – how much does George Bush personally pay for the Iraq invasion? While it is true that those who profit from the war also pay the taxes needed to support the war effort, the amount they pay in taxes is far less than they receive in profits – again, facts we know because there are always people willing and eager to supply the military.

The Risks of Annihilation

Those who decide on war and those who profit from war only start wars when there is no real risk of personal destruction. This is a simple historical fact, which can be gleaned from the reality that no nuclear power has ever declared war on another nuclear power. The US gave the USSR money and wheat, and yet invaded Grenada, Haiti and Iraq. (In fact, one of the central reasons it was possible to know in advance that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction capable of hitting the US was that US leaders were willing to invade it.)

Avoiding the risk of destruction was the reason that the USSR and the US (to take two obvious examples) fought “proxy wars” in out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea. As we shall see below, the fact that the risk of destruction is shifted to taxpayers (and taxpayer-funded soldiers) considerably changes the economic equation.

The Risks of Military Retaliation

The “risk of retaliation” in economic calculations regarding war should not be taken as a general risk, but rather a specific one – i.e. specific to those who either decide on war or profit from it. For example, Roosevelt knew that blockading Japan in the early 1940s carried a grave risk of retaliation – but only against distant and unknown US personnel in the Pacific, not against his friends and family in Washington. (In fact, the blockading was specifically escalated with the aim of provoking retaliation, in order to bring the US into WWII.)

If other people are exposed to the risk of retaliation, the risk becomes a moot point from an amoral economic standpoint. If I smoke, but some unknown stranger might get lung cancer, my decision to continue smoking will certainly be affected!

Externalizing Military Risk

The power of the State to so fundamentally shift the costs and benefits of violence is one of the most central facts of warfare – and the core reason for its continued existence. As we can see from the above table regarding arson, if the person who decides to profit through destruction faces the consequences himself, he has almost no economic incentive to do so. However, if he can shift the risks and losses to others – but retain the benefit himself – the economic landscape changes completely! Sadly, it then it becomes profitable, say, to tax citizens to pay for 800 US military bases around the world, as long as strangers in New York bear the brunt of the inevitable retaliation. It also becomes profitable to send uneducated youngsters to Iraq to bear the brunt of the insurgency.

Externalizing Emotional Discomfort

The fact that the State shifts the burden of risk and payment to the taxpayers and soldiers is very important in emotional terms. If the “arson” example could be tweaked to provide a profit – say, by reducing the risks of blackmail or retaliation – the other risks would still accrue to the man contemplating such violence. Such risks would cause emotional discomfort in all but the most rare and sociopathic personalities – and the generation of negative stimuli such as fear, guilt and worry would still require more profit than the model can reasonably generate.

Thus the fact that the State externalizes almost all the risks and costs of destruction is a further positive motivation to those who would use the power of State violence for their own ends. Once you throw in endless pro-war propaganda (also called “war-nography”), the emotional benefits of starting and leading wars funded by others can become a definitive positive – which ensures that wars will continue until the State collapses, or the world dies.

In Other Words, The State Is War

If the above is understood, then the hostility of anarchists towards the State should now be at least a little clearer. In the anarchist view, the State is a fundamental moral evil not only because it uses violence to achieve its ends, but also because it is the only social agency capable of making war economically advantageous to those with the power to declare it and profit from it. In other words, it is only through the governmental power of taxation that war can be subsidized to the point where it becomes profitable to certain sections of society. Destruction can only ever be profitable because the costs and risks of violence are shifted to the taxpayers, while the benefits accrue to the few who directly control or influence the State.

This violent distortion of costs, incentives and rewards cannot be controlled or alleviated, since an artificial imbalance of economic incentives will always self-perpetuate and escalate (at least, until the inevitable bankruptcy of the public purse). Or, to put it another way, as long as the State exists, we shall always live with the terror of war. To oppose war is to oppose the State. They can neither be examined in isolation nor opposed separately, since – much more than metaphorically – the State and war are two sides of the same bloody coin.

A Successful Operation (a dead patient!)

Most libertarians have, at one time or another, been challenged by the problem of public property, or how the market can best protect and allocate goods “owned” in common such as fish in the sea, roads, airwaves and so on. An old economics parable sums up the problem nicely – let’s briefly review it before taking a strong swing at solving the problem of public property.

The issue is well described by a parable called the problem of the commons (POTC), which goes something like this: a group of sheep-owning farmers own land in a ring around a common area. They each benefit individually from letting their sheep graze on the common land, since that frees up some of their own farmland for other uses. However, if they all let their sheep graze on the commons, they all suffer, since the land will be stripped bare, and so they will end up watching their sheep starve, since their own land has all been turned to other uses. In many circles, this is considered an incontrovertible coup de grace for the absolute right of private property – and the free market in general – insofar as it “proves” that individual self-interest, rationally pursued, can result in economic catastrophe. Due to the POTC, it is argued, the property rights of the individual must be curtailed for the sake of the “greater good.” Thus regulation and government ownership must be instituted to control the excesses of individual self-interest for the sake of long-term stability, blah blah blah.

There is one significant difficulty with the POTC, however, which is that it fails to prove that government regulation or public ownership is necessary, or that turning the POTC over to the State solves the problem in any way. In fact, it is easy to prove that even if the POTC is a real dilemma, the worst possible way of solving it is to create government regulations or public ownership.

Problem #1: Public Ownership

The simplest rebuttal to the POTC, of course, is to point out that the problem faced by the farmers is not an excess of private property, but a deficiency. If we imagine the farms surrounding the commons to be doughnut-shaped, then clearly the POTC is best solved by simply extending the ownership of the farms to the very center, like pizza slices (yes, these metaphors are making me hungry as well!). If private property is thus extended to include the commons, farmers no longer face the problem of everyone wanting to exploit un-owned resources. Everyone can then use their extra land to feed their sheep, and everyone is content. (Alternatively, a woman can come along, buy up the commons and start charging grazing fees. To ensure the longevity of her resource, she will naturally take care to avoid overgrazing.)

However, let us accept that under some circumstances the POTC is real, and cannot be overcome through the extension of private property rights. What solutions can then be brought to bear on the problem?

Solutions to social problems always fall into one of two categories: voluntary or coercive. Voluntary solutions to the POTC abound throughout history – the most notable being the kinds of social arrangements made by fishermen. When a number of fishing communities dot a lake, villagers develop complex and effective measures to ensure that the lake is not over-fished. Any display of wealth is frowned upon, since it is clear that wealth can only come from over-fishing. Communal leaders meet to figure out how much each village can catch – and it is very hard to hide your catch in a small village. Furthermore, the problem of not knowing exactly how much fish is being taken by others – as well as natural annual variations in fish stocks – lead to significant underestimation of allowable catches, which ensures that sustainability is always achieved. Left-leaning economists might be baffled by the POTC, but there is scant recorded historical evidence of illiterates in fishing villages regularly starving to death due to over-fishing (unless their village leaders were left-leaning economists perhaps).

The POTC is yet another manifestation of that old bugbear: the blind insistence that man is a being whose sole motivation is immediate financial considerations. (Economists who believe this and who also have children are most baffling in this regard!) “Ahhh,” says the miserly farmer of this ‘instant gratification’ fairy tale, “I will graze my sheep by night and callously denude the commons, so I can grow a dozen extra turnips!” But what good will his extra turnips do him if no one in the village will talk to him, or when no one will help him build a barn, or when he gets sick and needs people to care for his sheep? No, even miserly farmers are far better obeying the rules and forgetting about their extra turnips – since they will lose far more than they gain by circumventing social norms. Communities have weapons of ostracism and contempt that far outweigh immediate economic calculations.

(Has this changed in the Internet age? Surely we are far less constrained by social norms than we used to be! Not at all – now, with tools ranging from credit reports, web searches and easy access to prior employers, conformity to basic decency is more important than ever.)

Problem #2: The State as a ‘Common’

However, let us assume that none of the above rebuttals to the POTC holds firm, and in certain circumstances there is simply no way to extend property rights to, or exercise social control over, resources which cannot be owned – what then? Do we turn such a thorny and complex problem to the tender mercies of the State to solve?

One of the most interesting aspects of using the State to solve the POTC is that the State itself is subject to the problem of the commons.

Since the State is an entity wherein property is owned in “common,” the problem of selfish exploitation leading to general destruction applies as surely to State “property” as it does to the common land ringed by greedy and short-sighted farmers. Just as farmers can destroy the commons while pursuing their individual self-interest, so can politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists and other assorted State toadies and courtiers destroy the economy as a whole in pursuit of their own selfish economic and political goals.

The POTC argues that, due to “common ownership,” long-term prosperity is sacrificed for the sake of short-term advantage. Because no one defends and maintains property that can be utilized by all, that property is pillaged into oblivion. And – the State is supposed to solve this problem? How? That is exactly how the State operates!

Let’s look at some examples of how the State pillages the future for the sake of greed in the here-and-now:

• deficit financing;
• inflationary monetary expansion;
• government bonds, which future generations must pay out;
• spending the money taken in through social security, which future generations must pay for;
• offensive “defense” spending, which future citizens will pay for through increased risk of domestic attacks;
• massive educational failures, which have immensely deleterious effects on future productivity and happiness;
• the granting of special powers, rights and benefits to lobbyists such as unions, public sector employees and large corporations, which results in higher prices and deficits (the cost to the US economy for union laws alone is calculated at $50 trillion dollars over the past 50 years);
• the failure to adequately maintain public infrastructure such as roads, schools, bridges, the water supply and so on, which passes enormous liabilities onto the next generation;
• massive spending on the war on drugs, which increases crime in the future;
• the pollution of public lands and other fixed assets, which saves money in the short run while ruining value in the long run;
• …and goodness knows how much more!

From the above examples, it is easy to see that the POTC applies to the State to a far greater degree than any other social agency or individual. If we recall our group of greedy farmers, we can easily see that they have a strong incentive to avoid or solve the POTC, since it is they themselves who will suffer from the despoiling of un-owned lands. However, in the case of the State, those who prey upon and despoil the public purse will never themselves face the direct consequences of their pillaging. Thus their incentive to prevent, solve or even alleviate the problem is virtually non-existent.

Furthermore, even if the farmers do end up destroying the un-owned lands, they can at least get together and voluntarily work to find a better solution in the future. Once the government takes over a problem, however, control passes almost completely from the private sphere to the public sphere of enforcement, corruption and politics. Once firmly planted in the realm of the State, not only is the problem of public ownership made incalculably worse, but it cannot ever be resolved, since the predation of the public purse is now defended by all the armed might of the State military. Consequences evaporate, competition is eliminated, and a mad free-for-all grab-fest simply escalates until the public purse is drained dry and the State collapses. (This is what happened in the Soviet Union; in the 1980s, as it became clear that communism was unsustainable, Kremlin insiders simply pillaged the public treasury until the State went bankrupt.)

Thus the idea of turning to the State to solve the POTC is akin to the old medical joke about the operation being a complete success, with the minor exception that the patient died. If the POTC is a significant issue in the private sector, then turning it over to the government makes it staggeringly worse – turning it from a mildly challenging problem of economics into a suicidal expansion of State power and violence. If the problem of the commons is not a significant issue, then surely we do not need the State to solve it at all.

Either way, there is no compelling evidence or argument to be made for the value, morality or efficacy of turning problems of public ownership over to the armed might of the State. Both logically and ethically, it is the equivalent of treating a mild headache with a guillotine.

If the State is an evil, corrupt and destructive solution to the problems of social organization, what alternatives can anarchism offer?

Dispute Resolution Organizations

An essential aspect of economic life is the ability to enforce contracts and resolve intractable disputes. How can a stateless society provide these functions in the absence of a government?

The first thing to understand about contracts is that they are a form of insurance, insofar as they attempt to minimize the risks of noncompliance. If I enter into a five-year mortgage agreement with a bank, I will attempt to minimize my risks by requiring that the bank give me a fixed interest rate for the time period of the contract. My bank, on the other hand, will minimize its risk by retaining ownership of my house as collateral, in case I do not pay the mortgage.

In a world without risk, contracts would be unnecessary, and everyone would do business on a handshake. However, there are people who are dishonest, scatterbrained, manipulative and false, and so we need contracts which basically spell out the penalties for noncompliance to particular requirements.

In modern statist societies, contracts are generally enforced not through the court system, but rather through the threat of the court system. I was in business for many years, at an executive level, and I never once heard of a contract being successfully enforced through the state court system, although I did on occasion hear litigious threats – which is quite different. The threat was not so much, “I am going to use the court to enforce this contract,” but rather, “I am going to use the threat of taking you to court in order to enforce this contract.” The prospect of expensive and time-consuming legal action was always enough to force a resolution of some kind. No actual court compulsion was ever required.

It is quite easy to see that when a process that is designed to mediate disputes becomes itself a threat which causes disputes to be mediated privately, it has largely failed in its intent. State court systems have become like the quasi-private car insurance companies – the threats and inconvenience of using them has caused most people to settle their disputes privately, rather than involve themselves in something that they are forced to pay for, but can almost never use.

This bodes very well for anarchic solutions to contract disputes.

In a stateless society, entrepreneurs will be very willing and eager to provide creative solutions to the problems of contractual noncompliance. As a nonviolent solution, the profits will be maximized if noncompliance can be prevented, rather than merely addressed after the fact.

To take a simple example, let us pretend that you are a loans officer at a bank, and I come in requesting $10,000. Naturally, you will be very happy to lend me the money if I will pay back both the principal and interest on time, since that is how you make your profit. However, such a guarantee is completely impossible, since even if I have the money and the intent to pay you back, I could get hit by a bus while on my way to do so, leaving you perhaps $10,000 in the hole.

What questions will you need to answer in order to assess the risk? You will want to know two things in particular:

1. Have I consistently paid back loans in the past?
2. Do I have any collateral for the loan?

These two pieces of information are somewhat related. If I have consistently paid back loans in the past, then your need for collateral will be diminished. The more collateral that I am able to provide for the loan, the less it is necessary for me to have a good credit history.

The reason that a good credit history is so necessary is not just to establish my credit worthiness, but also to help the bank assess how much I have currently invested into my good reputation. If I have taken out loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past, and repaid them on time, then it scarcely seems likely that I would have gone through all of that just to steal $10,000.

If we say that my good credit rating saves me two percentage points on my interest payments, and that I will need a further $500,000 of loans over the course of my life, then my good credit rating will be saving me at a bare minimum tens of thousands of dollars. Thus, I would end up losing money if I took out a $10,000 loan and did not pay it back, since the cash benefit would not cover the losses I would incur through the destruction of my credit rating. Physical “collateral” is thus less required, since I have the very real “collateral” of a good credit rating.

These kinds of economic calculations occur regularly in a statist society, and would not vanish like the morning mist in a stateless society.

However, there are certain kinds of loans that some financial institutions would be willing to make, despite the high level of risk involved. Young people just starting out – who have no family to provide collateral – would be in a higher risk category, as would those who had failed to make loan payments in the past. As we can see from late-night television commercials for cars, no credit history – or even a bad credit history – does not make one permanently ineligible for loans.

There are two main ways to manage risk in any complex situation – hedging, and insurance. The “hedging” approach is to bet both for and against a particular outcome. In the world of currency trading, this means betting a certain amount that the dollar will go up, and another amount that the dollar will go down. In the world of horse racing, it means betting on more than one horse. This is also why people diversify their stock portfolios.

The “insurance” approach tends to be used where hedging is impossible. When I was an executive in the software world, my employees would often take out insurance in case I got sick or died. It was relatively impossible to “hedge” this risk, because keeping “backup employees” in a basement is not particularly cost-efficient, let alone moral. Life insurance is another example of this.

These strategies are already well-established in the current quasi-free market. However, in one-to-one contracts, state courts retain their monopoly. If I am an employee, I have a one-to-one contract with my employer; I cannot “hedge” the risks involved in this contract, and currently neither can I buy insurance to mitigate the risk that my employer will go out of business, while still owing me pay and expenses.

In the absence of a government, the need for the rational mitigation of risk in contracts would still be there, and entrepreneurs will inevitably provide creative and intelligent solutions to address this.

Breaking Contract

Let us take a relatively small example of how contract disputes can be resolved in a stateless society.

Let us say that I pay you $15,000 to landscape my garden, but you never show up to do the work. Ideally, I would like my $15,000 back, as well as another few thousand dollars for my inconvenience. In a stateless society, when we first put pen to paper on a contract, we can choose an impartial third party to mediate any dispute. If a conflict should arise that we cannot solve ourselves, we contractually agree in advance to abide by the decision of this Dispute Resolution Organization (DRO).

Since I am not an expert in pursuing people and getting money from them, if I had any doubts about your motives, capacity and honesty, I would simply pay this DRO a fee to recompense me if the deal goes awry. If you run off without doing the work, I simply submit my claim to the DRO, who then pays me $20,000.

When I first apply for this insurance, the DRO will charge me a certain amount of money, based on their evaluation of the risk I am taking by doing business with you. If you have cheated your last ten customers, the DRO will simply not insure the contract, thus implicitly informing me of the risk that I am taking. If you have a spotty record, then the DRO may charge me a few thousand dollars to insure your work – again, giving me a pretty good sense of how reliable you are.

On the other hand, if you have been in business for 30 years, and have never once cheated a customer, or received a complaint, then the DRO is simply insuring against delays caused by sudden madness or unexpected death. It may only charge me $50 for this eventuality.

This form of contract insurance is a very powerful positive incentive for honest dealings in business. The cost of insuring a contract is directly added to the cost of doing business, and so if it can be kept as low as humanly possible, the financial benefits to both parties are clear.

The cost of insuring a contract can be kept even lower if you are willing to provide collateral upfront. What this means is that if you cheat me out of the $15,000, and the DRO has to pay me $20,000, you promise to pay the DRO $25,000. If you cheat me, the DRO can then take this money directly out of your bank account.

In this way, contracts can be enforced without resorting to violence, or lengthy and incredibly expensive court battles. The risks of entering into contracts are clearly communicated up front, and honest people will be directly rewarded through lower enforcement costs, just as non-smokers are directly rewarded through lower life insurance costs.

Non-Payment

Suppose I have contracted with a DRO to pay restitution if I cannot fulfill my business obligations in some way, and end up owing them $100,000. What happens if I cannot pay, or simply refuse to pay?

Currently, the State will use violence against me if I do not pay. While this may be a satisfying form of medieval vengeance gratification, it scarcely helps me cough up $100,000 that the DRO actually wants from me. In a stateless society, what options are available for the DRO to get its money?

In any modern economy, individuals are bound by dozens of obligations and contracts, from apartment leases to gym memberships to credit cards contracts to insurance agreements. The costs of doing business with people who are known to honor their contracts is far lower, which is why it seems highly likely that a stateless society produce both DROs, and Contract Rating Agencies (CRAs).

CRAs would be independent entities that would objectively evaluate an individual’s contract compliance. If I become known as a man who regularly breaks his contracts, it will become more and more difficult for me to efficiently operate in a complex economy. This form of economic ostracism is an immensely powerful – and nonviolent – tool for promoting compliance to social norms and moral rules.

If an individual egregiously violates social norms – and we shall get to the issue of violent crime below – then one incredibly effective option that society has is to simply cease doing any form of business with such an individual.

If I cheat my DRO – or another individual – out of an enormous sum of money, the CRA could simply revoke my contract rating completely.

DROs would very likely have provisions which would simply state that they would not enforce any contract with anyone whose contract rating was revoked. In other words, if I run a hotel, and an “outcast” wants to rent a room, I will be immediately aware of this, since I will enter his credit card, and be promptly informed that no contract will be honored with this individual. In other words, if he sets fire to my hotel, steals or destroys property, or harasses another guest, then my DRO will not help me at all. Will I be likely to want to rent a room to this fellow, or will I tell him that, sadly, the hotel is full?

In the same way, grocery stores, taxicabs, bus companies, electricity providers, banks, restaurants and other such organizations will be very unlikely to want to do business with such an outcast, since they will have no protection if he misbehaves.

Economic interactions, of course, are purely voluntary, and no man can be morally forced to do business with another man. People who cheat and steal and lie will be highly visible in a stateless society, and will find that other people will turn away from them more often than not, unless they change their ways, and provide restitution for their prior wrongs.

An outcast can get his contract rating restored if he is willing to repay those he has wronged. If he gets a job and allows his wages to be garnished until his debts are paid off, his contract rating can be restored, at least to the minimum level required for him to hold a job and rent an apartment. A DRO, which is always interested in preventing recurrence, rather than dealing with consequences, may also reduce his burden if he is willing to attend psychological and credit counseling education.

In this way, contracts can be enforced without resorting to violence – the tool of economic and social ostracism is the most powerful method for dealing with those who repeatedly violate moral and social rules. We do not need to throw people into economically unproductive “debtor’s prisons” or send men with guns to kidnap and incarcerate them – all we need to do is publish their crimes for all to see, and let the natural justice of society take care of the rest.

Ah, but what if an “outcast” has been treated unjustly, and is being blackmailed by a DRO or CRA?

Well, remember that anarchism is always a two-sided negotiation. In order to get people to sign up to your DRO or CRA, what checks and balances would you put in your contracts to calm their fears in this regard?

The Stateless Society: An Examination of Alternatives

Let us turn to a more detailed examination of how private agencies could work in a free society.

Remember, these are only possible ideas about how such agencies could work – I’m sure that you have many of your own, which may be vastly superior to mine. The purpose of this section is not to create some sort of finalized blueprint for a stateless society, but to show how the various incentives and methodologies of freedom can create powerful and productive solutions to complex social problems, in a way that will forever elude a statist society.

We will start with a few articles that I originally published in 2005, which go over my theory of Dispute Resolution Organizations – DROs. More details about this approach are available in my podcast series as well.

If the Twentieth Century proved anything, it is that the single greatest danger to human life is the centralized political State, which murdered more than 200 million souls. Modern States are the last and greatest remaining predators. It is clear that the danger has not abated with the demise of communism and fascism. All Western democracies currently face vast and accelerating escalations of State power and centralized control over economic and civic life. In almost all Western democracies, the State chooses:

• where children go to school, and how they will be educated;
• the interest rate citizens can borrow at;
• the value of currency;
• how employees can be hired and fired;
• how more than 50% of their citizen’s time and money are disposed of;
• who a citizen may choose as a doctor;
• what kinds of medical procedures can be received – and when;
• when to go to war;
• who can live in the country;
• …just to touch on a few.

Most of these amazing intrusions into personal liberty have occurred over the past 90 years, since the introduction of the income tax. They have been accepted by a population helpless to challenge the expansion of State power – and yet, even though most citizens have received endless pro-State propaganda in government schools, a growing rebellion is brewing. The endless and increasing State predations are now so intrusive that they have effectively arrested the forward momentum of society, which now hangs before a fall. Children are poorly educated, young people are unable to get ahead, couples with children fall ever-further into debt, and the elderly are finding their medical systems collapsing under the weight of their growing needs. And none of this takes into account the ever-growing State debts.

These early years of the twenty-first century are thus the end of an era, a collapse of mythology comparable to the fall of communism, monarchy, or political Christianity. The idea that the State is even capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism – which foretells the imminent end, since as soon as skepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except expansion, and so can only survive on propaganda.

Yet while most people are comfortable with the idea of reducing the size and power of the State, they become distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of getting rid of it completely. To use a medical analogy, if the State is a cancer, they prefer medicating it into remission, rather than eliminating it completely.

This can never work. If history has proven anything, it is the simple fact that States always expand until they destroy society. Because the State uses violence to achieve its ends, and there is no rational end to the expansion of violence, States grow until they destroy the host civilization through the corruption of money, contracts, civility and liberty. As such, the cancerous metaphor is not misplaced. People who believe that the State can somehow be contained have not accepted the fact that no State in history has ever been contained.

Even the rare reductions are merely temporary. The United States was founded on the principle of limited government; it took little more than a few decades for the State to break the bonds of the Constitution, implement the income tax, take control the money supply, and begin its catastrophic expansion. There is no example in history of a State being permanently reduced in size. All that happens during a tax or civil revolt is that the State retrenches, figures out what it did wrong, and begins its expansion again – or provokes a war, which silences all but fringe dissenters.

Given these well-known historical facts, why do people continue believe that such a deadly predator can be tamed? Surely it can only be because they consider a slow strangulation in the grip of an expanding State somehow better than the “quick death” of a society bereft of a State.

Why do most people believe that a coercive and monopolistic social agency is required for society to function? There are a number of answers to this question, but they tend to revolve around four central points:

1. Dispute resolution;
2. Collective services;
3. Pollution, and;
4. Crime.

We will tackle the first three in this section, and the last one in the next.

Dispute Resolution

It is quite amazing that people still believe that the State somehow facilitates the resolution of disputes, given the fact that modern courts are out of the reach of all but the most wealthy and patient. In my experience, to take a dispute with a stockbroker to the court system would have cost more than a quarter of a million dollars and from five to ten years – however, a private mediator settled the matter within a few months for very little money. In the realm of marital dissolution, private mediators are commonplace. Unions use grievance processes, and a plethora of specialists in dispute resolution have sprung up to fill in the void left by a ridiculously lengthy, expensive and incompetent State court system.

Thus it cannot be that people actually believe that the State is required for dispute resolution, since the court apparatus is unavailable to the vast majority of the population, who resolve their disputes either privately or through agreed-upon mediators.

Collective Services

Roads, sewage, water and electricity and so on are all cited as reasons why a State must exist. How roads could be privately paid for remains such an impenetrable mystery that most people are willing to support the State – and so ensure the continual undermining of civil society – rather than concede that this problem is solvable. There are many ways to pay for roads, such as electronic or cash tolls, GPS charges, roads maintained by the businesses they lead to, or communal organizations and so on. The problem that a water company might build plumbing to a community, and then charge exorbitant fees for supplying it, is equally easy to counter, as mentioned above. None of these problems touch the central rationale for a State. They are all ex post facto justifications made to avoid the need for critical examination or, heaven forbid, a support of anarchism.

It is completely contradictory to argue that voluntary free-market relations are “bad” – and that the only way to combat them is to impose a compulsory monopoly on the market. If voluntary interactions are bad, how can coercive monopolies be better?

State provision of public services inevitably leads to the following:

• The granting of favorable contracts to political allies;
• Tax-subsidized costs leading to over-use, and intergenerational debt;
• A lack of renewal investment in infrastructure leading to expensive deterioration;
• A growth in coercive pro-union legislation, which spreads inefficiencies to other industries;
• A lack of innovation and exploration of alternatives to existing systems of production and distribution, and;
• A dangerous social dependence on a single provider.

…and many more such inefficiencies, problems and predations.

Due to countless examples of free market solutions to the problem of “carrier costs,” this argument no longer holds the kind of water is used to, so people must turn elsewhere to justify the continued existence of the State.

Pollution

This is perhaps the greatest problem faced by free market theorists. It is worth spending a little time on outlining the worst possible scenario, to see how a voluntary system could solve it. However, it is important to first dispel the notion that the State currently deals effectively with pollution. Firstly, the most polluted land on the planet is State-owned, because States do not profit from retaining the value of their property. Secondly, the distribution of mineral, lumber and drilling rights is directly skewed towards bribery and corruption, because States never sell the land, but rather just the resource rights. A lumber company cannot buy woodlands from the State, just harvesting rights. Thus the State gets a renewable source of income, and can further coerce lumber companies by enforcing re-seeding. This, of course, tends to promote bribery, corruption and the creation of “fly-by-night” lumber companies which strip the land bare, but vanish when it comes time to re-seed. Selling State land to a private company easily solves this problem, because a company that was willing to re-seed would reap the greatest long-term profits from the woodland, and therefore would be able to bid the most for the land.

Also, it should be remembered that, in the realm of air pollution, States created the problem in the first place. In England, when industrial smokestacks first began belching fumes into the orchards of apple farmers, the farmers took the factory-owners to court, citing the common-law tradition of restitution for property damage. Sadly, however, the capitalists had gotten to the State courts first, and had more money to bribe with, employed more voting workers, and contributed more tax revenue than the farmers – and so the farmer’s cases were thrown out of court. The judge argued that the “common good” of the factories trumped the “private need” of the farmers. The free market did not fail to solve the problem of air pollution – it was forcibly prevented from doing so because the State was corrupted.

However, it is a sticking point, so it is worth examining in detail how the free market might solve the problem of air pollution. One egregious example often cited is a group of houses downwind from a new factory which is busy night and day coating them in soot.

Now, when a man buys a new house, isn’t it important to him to ensure that he will not be coated with someone else’s refuse? The need for a clean and safe environment is so strong that it is a clear invitation for enterprising entrepreneurs to sweat bullets figuring out how to provide it.

If a group of homeowners is afraid of pollution, the first thing they will do is buy pollution insurance, which is a natural response to a situation where costs cannot be predicted but consequences are dire.

Let us say that a homeowner named John buys pollution insurance which pays him two million dollars if the air in or around his house becomes polluted. In other words, as long as John’s air remains clean, his insurance company makes money.

One day, a plot of land up-wind of John’s house comes up for sale. Naturally, his insurance company would be very interested in this, and would monitor the sale. If the purchaser is some private school, all is well (assuming John has not bought noise pollution insurance). If, however, the insurance company discovers that Sally’s House of Polluting Paint Production is interested in purchasing the plot of land, it will likely spring into action, taking one of the following courses:

• Buying the land itself, then selling it to a non-polluting buyer;
• Getting assurances from Sally that her company will not pollute;
• Paying Sally to enter into a non-polluting contract.

If, however, someone at the insurance company is asleep at the wheel, and Sally buys the land and puts up her polluting factory, what happens then?

Well, then the insurance company is on the hook for $2M to John (assuming for the moment that only John bought pollution insurance). Thus, it can afford to pay Sally up to $2M to reduce her pollution and still be cash-positive. This payment could take many forms, from the installation of pollution-control equipment to a buy-out to a subsidy for under-production and so on.

If the $2M is not enough to solve the problem, then the insurance company pays John the $2M and he goes and buys a new house in an unpolluted neighbourhood. However, this scenario is highly unlikely, since the insurance company would be unlikely to insure only one single person in a neighbourhood against air pollution.

So, that is the view from John’s air-pollution insurance company. What about the view from Sally’s House of Polluting Paint Production? She, also, must be covered by a DRO in order to buy land, borrow money and hire employees. How does that DRO view her tendency to pollute?

Pollution brings damage claims against Sally, because pollution is by definition damage to persons or property. Thus Sally’s DRO would take a dim view of her pollution, since it would be on the hook for any damage her factory causes. In fact, it would be most unlikely that Sally’s DRO would insure her against damages unless she were able to prove that she would be able to operate her factory without harming the property of those around her. And without a DRO, of course, she would be unable to start her factory, borrow money, hire employees etc.

It is important to remember that DROs, much like cell phone companies, only prosper if they cooperate. Sally’s DRO only makes money if Sally does not pollute. John’s insurer also only makes money if Sally does not pollute. Thus the two companies share a common goal, which fosters cooperation.

Finally, even if John is not insured against air pollution, he can use his and/or Sally’s DRO to gain restitution for the damage her pollution is causing to his property. Both Sally and John’s DROs would have reciprocity agreements, since John wants to be protected against Sally’s actions, and Sally wants to be protected against John’s actions. Because of this desire for mutual protection, they would choose DROs which had the widest reciprocity agreements.

Thus, in a truly free market, there are many levels and agencies actively working against pollution. John’s insurer will be actively scanning the surroundings looking for polluters it can forestall. Sally will be unable to build her paint factory without proving that she will not pollute. Mutual or independent DROs will resolve any disputes regarding property damage caused by Sally’s pollution.

There are other benefits as well, which are almost unsolvable in the current system. Imagine that Sally’s smokestacks are so high that her air pollution sails over John’s house and lands on Reginald’s house, a hundred miles away. Reginald then complains to his DRO/insurer that his property is being damaged. His DRO will examine the air contents and wind currents, then trace the pollution back to its source and resolve the dispute with Sally’s DRO. If the air pollution is particularly complicated, then Reginald’s DRO will place non-volatile compounds into Sally’s smokestacks and follow them to where they land. This can be used in a situation where a number of different factories may be contributing pollutants.

The problem of inter-country air pollution may seem to be a sticky one, but it is easily solvable – even if we accept that countries will still exist. Obviously, a Canadian living along the Canada/US border, for instance, will not choose a DRO which refuses to cover air pollution emanating from the US. Thus the DRO will have to have reciprocity agreements with the DROs across the border. If the US DROs refuse to have reciprocity agreements with the Canadian DROs – inconceivable, since the pollution can go both ways – then the Canadian DRO will simply start a US branch and compete.

The difference is that international DROs actually profit from cooperation, in a way that governments do not. For instance, a State government on the Canada/US border has little motivation to impose pollution costs on local factories, as long as the pollution generally goes north. For DRO’s, quite the opposite would be true.

There are so many benefits to the concept of State-less DRO’s that they could easily fill volumes. A few can be touched on here, to further highlight the value of the idea.

In a condominium building, ownership is conditional upon certain rules. Even though a man “owns” the property, he cannot throw all-night parties, or keep five large dogs, or operate a brothel. Without the coercive blanket of a central State, the opportunities for a wide variety of communities arise, which will largely eliminate the current social conflicts about the direction of society as a whole.

For instance, some people like guns to be available, while others prefer them to be unavailable. Currently, a battle rages for control of the State so that one group can enforce its will on the other. That’s unnecessary. With DRO’s, communities can be formed in which guns are either permitted, or not permitted. Marijuana can be approved or forbidden. Half your income can be deducted for various social schemes, or you can keep it all for yourself. Sunday shopping can be allowed, or disallowed. It is completely up to the individual to choose what kind of society he or she wants to live in. The ownership of property in such communities is conditional on following certain rules, and if those rules prove onerous or unpleasant, the owner can sell and move at any time. Another plus is that all these “societies” exist as little laboratories, and can prove or disprove various theories about gun ownership, drug legalization and so on, thus contributing to people’s knowledge about the best rules for communities.

One or two problems exist, however, which cannot be spirited away. A person who decides to live “off the grid” – or exist without any DRO representation – can theoretically get away with a lot. However, that is also true in the existing statist system. If a man currently decides to become homeless, he can more or less commit crimes at will – but he also gives up all beneficial and enforceable forms of social cooperation. Thus although DROs may not solve the problem of utter lawlessness, neither does the current system, so all is equal.

Interpersonal Crimes

Crimes against persons, such as murder and rape, are generally considered separate and distinct from those against property. However, this is a fairly modern distinction. In the European system of common law, crimes against persons were often punished through the confiscation of property. A rape cost the rapist such-and-such amount, a murder five times as much, and so on. This sort of arrangement is generally preferred by victims, who currently not only suffer from physical violation – but must also pay taxes to incarcerate the criminal. A woman who is raped would usually rather receive a quarter of a million dollars than pay a thousand dollars annually to cage her rapist, which adds insult to injury. Thus, crimes against persons and crimes against property are not as distinct as they may seem, since both commonly require property as restitution. A man who rapes a woman, then, incurs a debt to her of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, and must pay it or be ejected from all the economic benefits of society.

Finally, one other advantage can be termed the “Scrabble-Challenge Benefit.” In Scrabble, an accuser loses his turn if he challenges another player’s word and the challenge fails. Given the costs of resolving disputes, DROs would be very careful to ensure that those bringing false accusations would be punished through their own premiums, their contract ratings and by also assuming the entire cost of the dispute. This would greatly reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits, to the great benefit of all.

On a personal note, it has been my experience that, in talking over these matters for the last twenty-odd years, people honestly claim that they cannot conceive of a society without a centralized and coercive State. To which I feel compelled to ask them: exactly how many lawsuits have you pursued in your own life? I have yet to find even one person who has prosecuted a lawsuit through to conclusion. I also ask them whether they maintain their jobs through threats or blackmail. None. Do they keep their spouses chained in the basement? Not a one. Are their friends forced to spend time with them? Do they steal from the grocery store? Nope.

In other words, I say, it is clear that, although you say that you cannot imagine a society without a coercive State, you have only to look in the mirror to see how such a world might work. Everyone who is in your life is there by choice. Everyone you deal with on a personal or professional relationship interacts with you on a voluntary basis. You don’t use violence in your own life at all. If you are unsatisfied with a product, you return it. If you stop desiring a lover, you part. If you dislike a job, you quit. You force no one – and yet you say that society cannot exist without force. It is very hard to understand. People then reply that they do not need to use coercion because the State is there to protect them. I then ask them if they know how impossible it is to actually use the court system. They agree, of course, because they know it takes many years and a small fortune to approach even the vague possibility of justice. I also ask them if they are themselves burning to knock over an old woman and snatch her purse, but fear the police too greatly. Of course not. They just think that everyone else is. Well, after twenty years of conversations, I can tell you all: it’s not the case. Most people, given the correct incentives, act entirely honourably.

Of course, evil people exist. There are cold, sociopathic monsters in our midst. It is precisely because of the human capacity for evil that a centralized State always undermines society. Due to our capacity for sadism, our only hope is to decentralize authority, so that the evil among us can never rise to a station greater than that of excluded, hunted criminals. To create a State and give it the power of life and death does not solve the problem of human evil. It merely transforms the shallow desire for easy property to the bottomless lust for political power.

The idea that society can – and must – exist without a centralized State is the greatest lesson that the grisly years of the Twentieth Century can teach us. Our own society cannot escape the general doom of history, the inevitable destiny of social collapse as the State eats its own inhabitants. Our choice is not between the State and the free market, but between death and life. Whatever the risks of dissolving the central State, they are far less than the certain destruction of allowing it to escalate, as it inevitably will. Like a cancer patient facing certain demise, we must reach for whatever medicine shows the most promise, and not wait until it is too late.

The Stateless Society and Violent Crime

You might well now be thinking: how can a stateless society deal with violent criminals?

This challenging question can be answered using three approaches. The first is to examine how such criminals are dealt with at present; the second is to divide violent crimes into crimes of motive and crimes of passion, and the third is to show how a stateless society would deal with both categories of crime far better than any existing system.

The first question is: how are violent criminals dealt with at present? The honest answer, to any unbiased observer, is surely: they are encouraged.

A basic fact of life is that people respond to incentives. The better that crime pays, the more people will become criminals. Certain well-known habits – drugs, gambling, and prostitution in particular – are non-violent in nature, but highly desired by certain segments of the population. If these non-violent behaviors are criminalized, the profit gained by providing these services rises. Criminalizing voluntary interactions destroys all stabilizing social forces (contracts, open activity, knowledge-sharing and mediation), and so violence becomes the norm for dispute resolution.

Furthermore, wherever a law creates an environment where most criminals make more money than the police, the police simply become bribed into compliance. By increasing the profits of non-violent activities, the State ensures the corruption of the police and judicial system – thus making it both safer and more profitable to operate outside the law. It can take dozens of arrests to actually face trial – and many trials to gain a conviction. Policemen now spend about a third of their time filling out paperwork – and 90% of their time chasing non-violent criminals. Entire sections of certain cities are run by gangs of thugs, and the jails are overflowing with harmless low-level peons sent to jail as make-work for the judicial system – thus constantly increasing law-enforcement costs. Peaceful citizens are also legally disarmed through gun control laws. In this manner, the modern State literally creates, protects and profits from violent criminals.

Thus the standard to compare the stateless society’s response to violent crime is not some perfect world where thugs are effectively dealt with, but rather the current mess where violence is both encouraged and protected.

Before we turn to how a stateless society deals with crime, however, it is essential to remember that the stateless society automatically eliminates the greatest violence faced by almost all of us – the State that threatens us with guns if we don’t hand over our money – and our lives, should it decide to declare war. Thus it cannot be said that the existing system is one which minimizes violence. Quite the contrary – the honest population is violently enslaved by the State, and the dishonest provided with cash incentives and protection.

State violence – in its many forms – has been growing in Western societies over the past fifty years, as regulation, tariffs and taxation have all risen exponentially. National debts are an obvious form of intergenerational theft. Support of foreign governments also increases violence, since these governments use subsidies to buy arms and further terrorize their own populations. The arms market is also funded and controlled by governments. The list of State crimes can go on and on, but one last gulag is worth mentioning – all the millions of poor souls kidnapped and held hostage in prisons for non-violent “crimes.”

Since existing States terrorize, enslave and incarcerate literally billions of citizens, it is hard to understand how they can be seen as effectively working against violence in any form.

How does a stateless society deal with violence? First, it is important to differentiate the use of force into crimes of motive and crimes of passion. Crimes of motive are open to correction through changing incentives; any system which reduces the profits of property crimes – while increasing the profits of honest labor – will reduce these crimes. In the last part of this section, we will see how the stateless society achieves this better than any other option.

Crimes of motive can be diminished by making crime a low-profit activity relative to working for a living. Crime entails labor, and if most people could make more money working honestly for the same amount of labor, there will be far fewer criminals.

As you have read above, in a stateless society, Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) flourish through the creation of voluntary contracts between interested parties, and all property is private. How does this affect violent crime?

Let’s look at “break and enter.” If I own a house, I will probably take out insurance against theft. Obviously, my insurance company benefits most from preventing theft, and so will encourage me to get an alarm system and so on, just as occurs now.

This situation is more or less analogous to what happens now – with the not-inconsequential adjustment that, since DROs handle policing as well as restitution, their motives for preventing theft or rendering stolen property useless is far higher than it is now. As such, much more investment in prevention would be worthwhile, such as creating “voice activated” appliances which only work for their owners.

However, the stateless society goes much, much further in preventing crime – specifically, by identifying those who are going to become criminals, and preventing that transition. In this situation, the stateless society is far more effective than any State system.

In a stateless society, contracts with DROs are required to maintain any sort of economic life – without DRO representation, citizens are unable to get a job, hire employees, rent a car, buy a house or send their children to school. Any DRO will naturally ensure that its contracts include penalties for violent crimes – so if you steal a car, your DRO has the right to use force or ostracism against you to get the car back – and probably retrieve financial penalties to boot.

How does this work in practice? Let’s take a test case. Say that you wake up one morning and decide to become a thief. Well, the first thing you have to do is cancel your coverage with your DRO, so that your DRO has less incentive against you when you steal, since you are no longer a customer. DROs would have clauses allowing you to cancel your coverage, just as insurance companies have now. Thus you would have to notify your DRO that you were dropping coverage. No problem, you’re off their list.

However, DROs as a whole really need to keep track of people who have opted out of the entire DRO system, since those people have clearly signaled their intention to go rogue and live “off the grid.” Thus if you cancel your DRO insurance, your name goes into a database available to all DROs. If you sign up with another DRO, no problem, your name is taken out. However, if you do not sign up with any other DRO, red flags pop up all over the system.

What happens then? Remember – there is no public property in a stateless society. If you’ve gone rogue, where are you going to go? You can’t take a bus – bus companies will not take rogues, because their DRO will require that they take only DRO-covered passengers, in case of injury or altercation. Want to fill up on gas? No luck, for the same reason. You can try hitchhiking, of course, which might work, but what happens when you get to your destination and try to rent a motel room? No DRO card, no luck. Want to sleep in the park? Parks are privately owned, so keep moving. Getting hungry? No groceries, no restaurants – no food! What are you going to do?

So, really, what incentive is there to turn to a life of crime? Working for a living – and being protected by a DRO – pays really well. Going off the grid and becoming a rogue pits the entire weight of the combined DRO system against you – and, even if you do manage to survive and steal something, it has probably been voice-encoded or protected in some other manner against unauthorized use.

Let’s suppose that you somehow bypass all of that, and do manage to steal, where are you going to sell your stolen goods? You’re not protected by a DRO, so who will buy from you, knowing they have no recourse if something goes wrong? And besides, anyone who interacts with you may be dropped from the DRO system too, and face all the attendant difficulties.

Will there be underground markets? Perhaps – but where would they operate? People need a place to live, cars to rent, clothes to buy, groceries to eat. No DRO means no participation in economic life.

As well, prostitution, gambling and drugs will not be “illegal” in a stateless society – and the elimination of the war on drugs alone would, it has been estimated, eliminate 80% of violent crime. There are no import duties or restrictions, so smuggling becomes completely pointless. Currency would be private, as we will see below, so counterfeiting will be much harder.

Plus, no taxation – the take-home pay for an honest worker is far higher in a stateless society!

Fewer opportunities, lower profits – and greater incentives to do an honest day’s work – there is no better way to steer those who respond to incentives alone away from a life of crime.

Thus it is fair to say that any stateless society will do a far better job of protecting its citizens against crimes of motive – what, then, about crimes of passion?

Crimes of Passion

Crimes of passion are harder to prevent – but also present far less of a threat to those outside of the circle in which they occur.

Let’s say that a man kills his wife. They are both covered by DROs, of course, and their DRO contracts would include specific prohibitions against murder. Thus, the man would be subject to all the sanctions involved in his contract – probably confined labor and rehabilitation until a certain financial penalty was paid off, since DROs would be responsible for paying such penalties to any next of kin.

Fine, you say, but what if either the man or woman was not covered by a DRO? Well, where would they live? No one would rent them an apartment. If they own their house free and clear, who would sell them food? Or gas, water or electricity? Who would employ them? What bank would accept their money?

Let’s say that only the murderous husband – planning to kill his wife – opted out of his DRO system without telling her. The first thing that his wife’s DRO would do is inform her of her husband’s action – and the ill intent it may represent – and help her relocate if desired. If she decided against relocation, her DRO would promptly drop her, since by deciding to live in close proximity with a rogue man, she was exposing herself to an untenable amount of danger (and so the DRO to a high risk for financial loss). Now, both the husband and wife have chosen to live without DROs, in a state of nature, and thus face all the insurmountable problems of getting food, shelter, money and so on.

Thus, murderers would be subject to the punishments of their DRO restrictions, or would signal their intent by dropping DRO coverage beforehand, when intervention would be possible.

Let’s look at something slightly more complicated – stalking. A woman becomes obsessed with a man, and starts calling him at all hours and following him around. Perhaps boils a bunny or two. If the man has bought insurance against stalking, his DRO will leap into action. It will call the woman’s DRO, which then says to her: stop stalking this man or we’ll drop you. And how does her DRO know whether she has really given up her stalking? Well, the man stops reporting it. And if there is a dispute, she just wears an ankle bracelet for a while to make sure. And remember – since there is no public property, she can be ordered off sidewalks, streets and parks.

(If the man has not bought insurance against stalking, no problem – it will just be more expensive to buy with a “pre-existing condition.”)

Although they may seem unfamiliar to you, DROs are not a new concept – they are as ancient as civilization itself, but have been shouldered aside by the constant escalation of State power over the last century or so. In the past, undesired social behaviour was punished through ostracism, and risks ameliorated through voluntary “friendly societies.” A man who left his wife and children – or a woman who got pregnant out of wedlock – was no longer welcome in decent society. DROs take these concepts one step further, by making all the information formerly known by the local community available to the world as whole, just like credit reports. (If you prefer your information to be kept more private, DROs will doubtless offer this option.)

There are really no limits to the benefits that DROs can confer upon a free society – insurance could be created for such things as:

• a man’s wife giving birth to a child that is not his own;
• a daughter getting pregnant out of wedlock;
• fertility problems for a married couple;
• …and much more.

All of the above insurance policies would require DROs to take active steps to prevent such behaviors – the mind boggles at all the preventative steps that could be taken! The important thing to remember is that all such contracts are voluntary, and so do not violate the moral absolute of non-violence.

In conclusion – how does the stateless society deal with violent criminals? Brilliantly! In a stateless society, there are fewer criminals, more prevention, greater sanctions – and instant forewarning of those aiming at a life of crime by their withdrawal from the DRO system. More incentives to work, fewer incentives for a life of crime, no place to hide for rogues, and general social rejection of those who decide to operate outside of the civilized world of contracts, mutual protection and general security. And remember – governments in the 20^th century caused more than 200 million deaths – are we really that worried about private hold-ups and jewelry thefts in the face of those kinds of numbers?

There is no system that will replace faulty men with perfect angels, but the stateless society, by rewarding goodness and punishing evil, will at least ensure that all devils are visible – instead of cloaking them in the current deadly fog of power, politics and propaganda.

These Cages Are Only for Beasts…

As mentioned above, DROs are private insurance companies whose sole purpose is to mediate disputes between individuals. If you and I sign a contract, we both agree beforehand to submit any disputes we cannot resolve to the arbitration of a particular DRO. Furthermore, we may choose to allow the DRO to take action if either of us fails to abide by its decision, such as property seizure or financial penalties.

So far so good. However, a problem arises if I have no DRO contract, and turn to a life of theft, murder and arson. How can that be dealt with? Above, I suggested that DROs would simply band together to deny goods, services and contracts to violent criminals.

Some readers may be concerned about the power that DROs have in a stateless society. When describing how a stateless society could deal with murderers, we are reviewing an extreme situation, not everyday economic and social relations. A doctor might say: if a patient has an infected leg, and you have no antibiotics, amputate the leg. This does not mean that he advocates cutting off limbs in less serious circumstances. When I say that DROs will track violent criminals and try to deny them goods and services, I do not mean that DROs would be able to do this to just anyone. First of all, customer choice would make this impossible. A store owner can ban anyone he likes – but he cannot do so arbitrarily, or he will go out of business. Similarly, if people see a DRO acting unjustly or punitively, it will quickly find itself without customers.

The most important thing to remember is that DRO contracts are perfectly voluntary – and that hundreds of DROs will be constantly clamoring for our business. If we are afraid that they will turn into a myriad of quasi-police states, they have to address those fears if want they us as customers.

How will they do that? Why, through contractual obligations, of course! In order to sign us up, DROs will have to offer us instant contractual release – and lucrative cash rewards – if they ever harass us or treat us arbitrarily. As a matter of course, DRO contracts will include a provision to submit any conflicts with customers to a separate DRO of the customers’ choosing. All this is standard fare in the reduction of contractual risk.

In other words, every person who says, “DROs will turn into dangerous fascistic organizations,” represents a fantastic business opportunity to anyone who can address that concern in a positive manner. If you dislike the idea of DROs, just ask yourself: is there any way that my concerns could be alleviated? Are there any contractual provisions that might tempt me into a relationship with a DRO? If so, the magic of the free market will provide them. Some DROs will offer to pay you a million dollars if they treat you unjustly – and you can choose the DRO that makes that decision! Other DROs will band together and form a review board which regularly searches their warehouses for illicit arms and armies. DROs will fund “watchdog” organizations which regularly rate DRO integrity.

If none of the above appeals to you, then the DRO system is clearly not for you – but then neither is the current State system, which is already one-sided, repressive and dictatorial. And remember – in a free society such as I describe, you can always choose to live without a DRO, of course, or pay for its services as needed (as I mention in “The Stateless Society”) – as long as you do not start stealing and killing.

For those who still think DROs will become governments, I invite you to take a look at a real-world example of a DRO – one of the world’s largest “employers.” Currently, over 300,000 people rely on it for a significant portion of their income. Most of what they sell is so inexpensive that lawsuits are not cost-effective, and transactions regularly cross incompatible legal borders – in other words, they operate in a stateless society. So how does eBay resolve disputes? Simply through dialogue and the dissemination of information (see http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/unpaid-item-process.html). If I do not pay for something I receive, I get a strike against me. If I do not ship something that I was paid for, I also get a strike. Everyone I deal with can also rate my products, service and support. If I am rated poorly, I have to sell my goods for less since, everything else being equal, people prefer dealing with a better-rated vendor (or buyer). If enough people rate me poorly, I will go out of business, because the risk of dealing with me becomes too great. There are no police or courts or violence involved here – thefts are simply dealt with through communication and information sharing.

Thus eBay is an example of the largest DRO around – are we really afraid that it is going to turn into a quasi-government? Do any of us truly lie awake wondering whether the eBay SWAT team is going to break down our doors and drag us away to some offshore J2EE coding gulag?

Any system can be abused – which is why governments are so abhorrent – and so checks and balances are essential to any proposed form of social organization. That’s the beauty of the DRO approach. Those who dislike, mistrust or fear DROs do not have to have anything to do with them, and can rely on handshakes, reputation and trust – or start their own DRO. Those whose scope prohibits such approaches – multi-million dollar contracts or long-term leases come to mind – can turn to DROs. Those who are afraid of DROs becoming mini-States can set up watchdog agencies and monitor them (paid for by others who share such fears, perhaps).

In short, either the majority of human beings can cooperate for mutual advantage, or they cannot. If they can, a stateless society will work – especially since millions of minds far better than mine will be constantly searching for the best solutions. If they cannot, then no society will ever work, and we are doomed to slavery and savagery by nature.

Therefore, I stand by my thesis in “Caging the Beasts” above – if you mug, rape or kill, I will support any social action that thwarts your capacity to survive in society. I want to see you hounded into the wilderness, refused hotel rooms and groceries – and I want your face plastered everywhere, so that the innocent can stay safe by keeping you at bay. I abhor the thug as much as I abhor the State – and it is because such thugs exist that the State cannot be suffered to continue, since the State always disarms honest citizens and encourages, promotes and protects the thugs.

(For more details about DROs and how disputes can be resolved in a stateless society, you can subscribe to: https://feeds.freedomain.com/freedomain-radio-anarchism.xml.)

Stateless Dictatorships: How a Free Society Prevents the Re-emergence of a Government

By far the most common objection to the idea of a stateless society is the belief that one or more private Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs) would overpower all the others and create a new government. This belief is erroneous at every level, but has a kind of rugged persistence that is almost admirable.

Here is the general objection:

In a society without a government, whatever agencies arise to help resolve disputes will inevitably turn into a replacement government. These agencies may initially start as competitors in a free market, but as time goes by, one will arise to dominate all the others economically, and will then wage war against its competitors, and end up imposing a new State upon the population. The instability and violence that this “DRO civil war” will inflict upon the population is far worse than any existing democratic State structure. Thus, a stateless society is far too risky an experiment, since we will just end up with a government again anyway!

This objection to an anarchic social structure is considered self-evident, and thus is never presented with actual proof. Naturally, since the discussion of a stateless society involves a future theoretical situation, empirical examples cannot apply.

However, like all propositions involving human motivation, the “replacement state” hypothesis can be subjected to logical examination.

Premises

The basis of the “replacement state” hypothesis is the premise that people prefer to maximize their income with the lowest possible expenditure of energy. The motivation for a DRO to use force is that, by eliminating all competition and taking military control of a geographical region, a DRO can make much more money than through free market competition, and that it is worth it to invest resources in military conflict in order to secure the permanent revenue source of a new tax base.

We can fully accept this premise, as long as it is applied consistently to all human beings in a stateless society. To make the “replacement state” case even stronger, we will also assume that no moral scruples could conceivably get in the way of any decision-making. By reducing the “drive to dominate” to a mere calculation of economic efficiency, we can eliminate any possible ethical brakes on the situation.

Starting Point

Let us start with a stateless society, wherein citizens can voluntarily choose to contract with a DRO for the sake of property protection and dispute resolution. Each citizen also has the right to break his contract with his DRO.

There are essentially three possible ways that a DRO could gain military control of an entire region:

1. By secretly amassing an army, and then suddenly unleashing it upon all competitors;
2. By openly amassing an army, and then doing the same thing;
3. By posing as a voluntary “Defense DRO,” amassing arms supposedly for the legitimate defense of citizens, and then turning those arms against the citizens and instituting itself as a new government.

There is one additional possibility, which is that a private citizen can try to assemble his own army.

Let’s deal with each of these in turn.

The Secret Army

In this scenario, let’s say that a DRO manager called “Bob” decides that he is tired of dealing with customers on a voluntary basis. He decides he is going to spend company money buying enormous amounts of armaments and training an army. (For the moment, let us assume that Bob can make this decision entirely on his own, and does not need to submit to any sort of Board, bank or investor review.)

Let us assume that Bob’s DRO has annual revenues of $500 million a year, and profits of $50 million a year.

The most immediate challenge that Bob is going to face is: how on earth am I going to pay for an army? Given that, in a free society, there is no way of knowing exactly how many citizens are armed – or what kinds of weapons they have – it would be necessary to err on the side of caution and assemble a fairly prodigious and overwhelming army to gain control of an entire region, otherwise Bob’s investment would be entirely lost in a military defeat. Such armies are scarcely cheap. For the purposes of this argument, let’s say that it is going to cost $500 million over five years for Bob to assemble his army – surely a lowball estimate. How is he going to get the money to pay for this?

Raising Rates

The most obvious way for Bob to raise the extra $500 million is to charge his customers more. The $500 million Bob needs represents more than 10 years of his DROs annual profits of $50 million a year (reinvesting the $50m for 5 years at 10% yields $805.26m). Thus, in order to pay for his army within five years, Bob is going to have to more than double his prices. Since we have already assumed that it is Bob’s greed that makes him want to create a new government – and that this greed is common to all citizens within the society – we can also assume that his customers share his motivation. Thus, just as Bob wants to have an army so that he can maximize his income, his customers just as surely do not want Bob to have an army, for exactly the same reasons. The moment that Bob informs his customers that he will now be charging them more than double for exactly the same services, he will lose all his customers, and go out of business. Sadly, no army for Bob.

Full Disclosure

Perhaps, though, Bob recognizes this danger, and plans to keep his customers by telling them that he is raising their rates in order to fund an army. “Help me buy an army by paying me double your current rates,” he tells them, “and I will share the plunder I’ll get when I take over such-and-such a neighborhood!” Even if we assume that Bob’s customers believe him, and are willing to fund such a mad scheme, Bob’s secret is now out, and society as a whole – including all the other DROs – have been informed of Bob’s nefarious intentions. Clearly, all the other DROs will immediately cease doing business with Bob’s DRO. Since a central value of any DRO is its ability to interact with other DROs – just as a core value of a cell phone company is its ability to interact with other cell phone companies – Bob’s DRO will thus be crippled. In other words, Bob will be more than doubling his rates for many years – while providing a far inferior service – for a highly uncertain and dangerous “profit.”

In addition, Bob’s bank would immediately cease doing business with him, rendering him unable to pay his employees, his office rental, or his bills. Bob’s electricity company will cease supplying electricity, he will find his taps strangely dry, his phones will be cut off, and many other misfortunes will arise as a result of his stated desire to become a new dictator. It is hard to imagine him lasting five days, let alone retaining all of his paying customers at double the rates for the five years required to build his army!

Even if all the above problems could somehow be overcome, it is hard to imagine that Bob’s customers would be happy to arm Bob in the hopes of sharing in his plunder. Unlike the government, which can tax at will, DROs must actually protect their customer’s property in order to retain their business. Given that those who contract with DROs are those with the most interest in protecting their property, it makes little sense that they would fund Bob’s DRO army, since they would have no actual control with that army once it was created, and thus no way of enforcing any “plunder contract” created beforehand. In a free society, people would not try to “protect” their property by funding a powerful army that could then take it away from them at will. That sort of madness requires the existence of a government!

Alternative Funding

Perhaps Bob will try to fund his army in other ways. He may try and borrow the money, but his bank will only lend him the money if he comes up with a credible and measurable business plan. If Bob’s business plan openly states his desire to create an army, his bank would cease supporting him in any way, shape or form, since the bank would only stand to lose if such an army were created. If Bob took the money from the bank by submitting a fraudulent business plan, the bank would be aware of this almost immediately, and would take the remainder of the money back – and impose stiff penalties on Bob to boot! Again, no army for Bob.

What if Bob tried to pay for his army by reducing the dividends he was paying to shareholders? Naturally, the shareholders would resent this, and would either have him thrown out, or would simply sell their shares and invest their money elsewhere, thus crippling Bob’s DRO. Perhaps Bob would try paying his employees less, but that would only drive his employees into the arms of other DROs – also destroying his business.

It is safe to say that it is practically impossible for Bob to get the money to pay for his army – and even if he got such money, his business would never survive such a dangerous transgression of social and economic norms.

There are other dangers, however, which are well worth examining.

Defense DROs

The most likely threat would seem to come from “Defense DROs,” since those agencies would already have weapons and personnel that might be used against the general population. However, this would be very difficult for two main reasons. First, “Defense DROs” would require investment and banking relationships in order to grow and flourish. Given that investors and banks would not want to fund an army that could steal their property, they would be certain to insert myriad “failsafe” mechanisms into their “Defense DRO” contracts. They would make sure that all arms purchases were tracked, that all monies were accounted for, and that no secret armies were being assembled.

“Defense DROs” would also be subject to the same kinds of funding problems as Bob’s DRO. Let’s say that Dave is the head of a “Defense DRO,” and wakes up one day seized by the desire to assemble his own army and pillage society.

First of all, citizens would never contract with any “Defense DRO” that would not submit to regular audits of its weapons and accounts to ensure that no secret armies were being created. If Dave decides to bypass this contractual obligation, and start secretly funding his own army, how is he going to pay for it? The moment he raises his rates without increasing his services, his customers will know exactly what he’s up to, and withdraw their support. Bye-bye army. Dave’s funding would also be subject to all the other problems raised above.

It can thus be seen that there is no viable way for any DRO to pay for a secret army without destroying its business in the process. Armies are only really possible when the government can force taxpayers to subsidize them.

Independently Wealthy?

Perhaps, instead of Bob or Dave, we have a privately wealthy individual named Bill, a multibillionaire who decides to raise an army and institute himself as a new dictator. Due to his immense wealth, he is not dependent on any customers, employees, or shareholders. Let us say that he can pay for an army out of his own pocket, immediately.

Bill’s challenge, of course, is that in a free society, he cannot exactly pick up a complete army at his local Wal-Mart. Armies are fundamentally uneconomical, expensive overhead at best, and thus it seems likely that geographical defense in a free society would be limited to a couple of dozen nuclear weapons, to deter any potential invader. Thus even if he could get a hold of one, buying a nuke would not help Bill very much, since he would be unable to use it to overwhelm all of the other “Defense DROs.”

What about more conventional weapons? Part of the service that “Defense DROs” would offer to subscribers would be a guarantee that they would do everything in their power to prevent the rise of an independent army – either of their own making, or of anyone else’s. Thus arms manufacturers would have to provide rigorous accounts of everything they were making and selling, to be sure that they weren’t selling arms to some secret army, probably in the foothills of Montana. If people were really worried about the possibility of someone creating a private army, they would only do business with “Defense DROs” that guaranteed that they bought their arms from open and legitimate arms dealers – subject to independent verification, of course.

Thus when Bill came along trying to buy $500 million worth of weapons, and hire an army of tens of thousands of soldiers, one question would be: where on earth would they come from? Arms manufacturers would not be sitting on $500 million of inventory, due to the limited demand for such products, and the costs of making and storing them. Thus the arms manufacturers would have to really crank up their production, which could not be hidden from the general population, or the Defense DROs that such extra production would directly threaten. In order to make all the extra armaments, manufacturers would have to borrow money to expand production. Where would they get this extra money from? Their banks would surely not fund such a dangerous endeavor, and would immediately notify any Defense DROs it had contracts with, and drop the rogue arms manufacturer as a customer. Defense DROs and general customers would also never do business with such a dangerous arms manufacturer ever again, thus driving it out of business.

No manufacturer would ever expand production for a “one time” purchase, any more than you would buy a car to make a single trip. Also – why would an arms manufacturer sell deadly weapons to a private individual, knowing that this individual would be able to use those arms to steal more weapons from the manufacturer?

Secondly, even if Bill could somehow get his hands on the necessary weapons, where would these tens of thousands of new troops come from? In a stateless society, the military would not be exactly the same kind of “in demand” career that it is today. In order to assemble an army of tens of thousands of men, Bill would have to advertise, recruit, pay them, train them, etc. This would be impossible to hide. Since it would be completely obvious that Bill was assembling an army, what could people in society conceivably do to stop him?

First of all, if this were a potential risk, his bank would have a clause in its service agreement giving it the right to refuse to honor any payments clearly designed to fund a private army. Secondly, no DRO would do business with Bill – or his soldiers – the moment that it became apparent what he was up to. This would mean that none of Bill’s soldiers would have any guarantees that they would get paid, grocery stores would not sell them food, electricity companies would cut them off, gas stations would not sell them gas, etc. When society as a whole wants to stop doing business with you, it becomes very hard to get by.

The Question of Profit

Remember, we began this section with the premise that someone would want an army in order to make money. Let us see if this can be achieved, even if all the above obstacles can somehow be overcome.

Let us say that our first friend “Bob” can somehow get his army – the question is: can he make that army pay?

Remember, it cost Bob $500 million over five years to assemble his army – let us say that it costs another $1 billion over the next five years to subdue a reasonably-sized region, due to the loss of life and equipment involved in combat. What kinds of financial returns can Bob expect?

If you know that Bob’s army is going to be at your house in two weeks, and there is no way to stop it, you would just pull a “scorched-earth Russian defense” and leave, right? You would take everything of value with you, and perhaps destroy everything that you could not bring. Thus, what would Bob’s army end up getting control of? Not much.

However, let us imagine that Bob’s army could somehow seize assets that would be worth something. How much would they have to steal in order to make a profit?

First, let us look at the alternatives, or the opportunity costs of Bob’s army.

Bob has to invest $100 million each year over five years to assemble his army – what does that cost him overall?

If Bob invested the $100 million back into his DRO instead, he will likely get 10% ROI. In five years of compound returns, that translates to $832.61m.

Then, Bob has to invest another billion dollars over the next five years invading a series of neighborhoods. How much does that really cost him? $1,665.22m, or $1 billion invested at 10% over five years. But that’s not all – the $832.61m above would also have gained 10% per year over the remaining 5 years, resulting in a total of $1,340.93m.

Thus Bob’s five years of preparation and five years of military rampaging have cost him over $3 billion. Given the enormous risks involved in such an endeavor, investors would likely demand at least a 20:1 pay off – similar to the software field. Thus Bob would have to steal well over $60 billion, given that he would likely want to keep some money for himself.

Where would this $60 billion come from? The burned-out houses? The abandoned cars? It is hard to imagine that anything Bob got his hands on would be worth very much at all.

(The evidence of history tends to support this conclusion. Economically, imperialism is a disaster for everyone except those intimately connected to the coercive power of the State.)

Also, Bob has wrecked an economy that was enabling him to generate a 10% annual return on his investments – even if he steals billions of dollars, it would still be less than he would have received over the course of his life if he had just re-invested his money! Reinvestment also carries with it the considerable advantage of not exposing Bob to the risk of death through assassination or war.

What if Bob wanted to spring a surprise attack on citizens and start taxing them? Again, all the other DROs would stand to lose all their customers in such an event, and so would take all necessary steps to prevent it from occurring. They would have to provide innovative “checks and balances” solutions to potential customers in order to win them as clients, ensuring their collective vigilance against such surprise attacks. Furthermore, given that there are no borders in a stateless society, those that Bob’s army encircled would just abscond in the middle of the night, fleeing his predations.

However, even if all of the above problems can be somehow overcome, and the creation of a rogue army in a free society could become both possible and profitable, the solution to this danger is simple. Any “Defense DRO” would simply buy the trust of its clients by promising to pay them a fine in excess of any potential military profits if that DRO was ever discovered to be assembling an army. As mentioned above, DROs would simply put millions of dollars in trust, payable to any customer that could find evidence proving that a rogue army was being created. Problem solved.

When we look at the series of steps required to make the creation of a private “rogue” army economically profitable, we can see that it becomes so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. If we assume that the economic incentive of maximizing profits would drive someone to consider such a course, we can easily see that the fears of inevitable private tyrannies are merely imaginary.

The “replacement state” mythology is just another ghost story invented to keep us in cages whose bars are merely fictional.

Irrational Laws?

Another question that constantly arises about anarchistic social organization is the degree to which different communities will create or maintain unjust or irrational rules. What would stop an Islamic community from imposing Sharia law, or a particular group that wishes to raise their children communally, or have multiple spouses, or ban the wearing of red clothing?

This is of course possible, but there are several tendencies within an anarchic society that will discourage and eliminate such obtuse practices in the long run.

First of all, though, it is important to understand that there is no real solution for this in a statist society – assuming it is not a dictatorship. As long as we do not aggress against others, if a group of friends and I wish to get together and live in an enormous house, share all our property and live in some polyamorous hippie flesh-pile, there is nothing illegal about this in a statist society. As long as our children are fed, cared for and educated, we can all choose to live common-law and raise our children collectively if we want.

Similarly, if a group of Muslims wish to live according to Sharia rules, and everyone voluntarily accepts these rules and lives by them of their own free will, there is very little that a stateless society can do about that either. Since governments only have violence and propaganda to maintain their rule, they can only send SWAT teams in to break up communes, or tanks and helicopters to dismember religious groups – but very few of us would applaud that as a reasoned and positive response to the challenges of varying beliefs within society.

Economically, a stateless society is fundamentally characterized by an inability for particular groups to violently offload the costs of their preferences onto others.

If you are part of a group that wishes to invade Iraq, for instance you will have to find a way to fund that yourself – you will not be able to print money or tax others to pay for your preferences. Do any of us truly believe that the chicken-hawks in the current political administration would have decided to commit genocide against the Iraqi population if they had been sent the multi-trillion dollar bill for the evils they contemplated? Would any purely private financial institution have funded such a monstrous invasion? Of course not – war is impossible without taxation.

The most economically efficient legal system is the one which extends reasonable resources to prevent problems before they occur – and then sits inert until someone complains about an injustice.

The DRO system is wonderful at preventing problems, since it inherently contains all sorts of red flags for potential criminal behavior, as described above. What do I mean by saying that it will very likely sit in an inert state?

Let us look at gambling as an example.

Gambling – though obviously potentially addictive – is a voluntary transaction between adults. In any reasonable legal system, where there is consent, there can be no crime. A man may complain if he loses his shirt at a roulette table, but he cannot claim that he was the victim of force or fraud.

If we understand this, we can see that there is an enormous difference between a proactive and a reactive legal system. A reactive legal system waits patiently until it receives a complaint about an injustice – then, it leaps into action to provide justice.

A proactive legal system sends armed men out in waves, ferreting and rooting around in society in order to capture and punish adults interacting in a voluntary and peaceful manner. This kind of legal system is an ugly stepchild of the Spanish Inquisition, and arises out of a hysterical form of aggressive moral puritanism, generally religious in origin. In this kind of legal system, an absence of force or fraud is not enough to allow people to escape moral condemnation, capture and punishment. These “voluntary crimes” tend to revolve around mind-altering substances, gambling and prostitution, and are often instigated in a statist society by women who find out that they have married the wrong men (the Women’s Christian Temperance Union etc.)

Activities which certain people find distasteful are ferreted out and punished not because the participants find them evil or immoral, but because others do. The man who smokes some vegetation, gambles some money, or pays for sex obviously is not the criminal complainant – neither is the person who sells him weed, casino chips or sex. Instead, it is others who wish to wreak their moral vengeance upon such transgressions.

Mencken once wrote: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” As a philosopher, I do not counsel or believe that drugs, gambling or visiting prostitutes is a recipe for long-term happiness and wisdom – but I also understand that unwise or ill-considered actions are not solved by the initiation of violence.

The insertion of this “third party” into a legal system – the entity that brings charges in the absence of complaints by any individuals in a transaction – is very, very expensive. Can you imagine how expensive it would be for a computer company to send someone over to your house every time you wanted to install a program, to make sure you got it right? Compare this to the cost of your average reactive tech support call center – it would be hundreds – if not thousands – of times more expensive.

There are many people who find it highly objectionable that other people enjoy taking mind-altering substances – how many of them would be willing to fund the true cost of their outrage themselves?

In the United States, the Drug Enforcement Agency budget for 2007 was over $2.3 billion. If we imagine that there are perhaps 25 million taxpaying adults in America who are virulently anti-drug, would they remain as virulently opposed to drugs if each of them received a bill for $100 a year? What about the approximately $100 per year that it costs to incarcerate the resulting prisoners, and the $100 in other law enforcement costs? Overall, the war on drugs costs over $20 billion a year - $800 for each of the 25 million taxpaying adults who find drugs so objectionable.

How many of these people would find themselves somehow magically able to manage a “live and let live” attitude towards drug consumption if they were sent an $800 bill every single year? Can we imagine that 50% of them would drop out? If so, then the remaining 12.5 million people would be sent a bill for $1,600 – how many of them would drop out that this rate? Half? Very well – then the remaining would be sent a bill for $3,200 – and so on, until the last man to be sent the bill for $20 billion somehow found it in his heart to avoid the bill by embracing tolerance and compassion.

The “drug war” (which is a war of course on people, not drugs) would inevitably collapse if those who found drugs so objectionable actually had to pay for their moral outrage themselves.

Similarly, enforcing Sharia law requires just such a proactive legal system, which is horrendously expensive relative to a reactive legal system. How long would such religious intransigence last if the fanatics had to pay for their mania themselves, and faced competition from perfectly functional legal systems that charged one tenth the cost?

Proactive legal systems are prohibitively expensive, unless the costs can be violently extracted from others. In this way, we know for certain that proactive legal systems would have a very short lifespan in a stateless society, and that the natural justice of reactive legal systems would very quickly become – and remain – the norm.

What is commonly called “culture,” in other words, is most often little more than a set of violently subsidized and irrational prejudices.

Tank Control

Two other questions that arise about anarchism is the “tank in the garden” problem and the question of gun control. I have kept these examples in the “Reasoning” section because the answers to these questions pertain so many other questions as well.

The Tank in the Garden

This objection runs something along these lines:

“Let us suppose that you have a neighbor who becomes obsessed with military hardware, and begins building a tank in his backyard. It looks like a very realistic tank, and he even gets a hold of shells. He then drives the tank back and forth in his backyard, and points the turret directly at your house. Clearly, this is not a good situation for you, but your neighbor is only exercising his own property rights, and so what right do you have to interfere with his tank-building? Certainly, if he accidentally blows the top off your house, you can act in response, but surely you should not have to wait for such a disaster in order to intervene – forcefully, if necessary.”

If we believe that anarchism is a society without rules or laws, then this would seem to be a perplexing problem. In a statist society, you simply have laws against private tank ownership, and the problem is solved!

However, as we have discussed above, anarchism is not a society without rules or laws, but is rather populated by agencies entirely devoted to preventing foreseeable problems. Some problems are complicated and hard to detect – but the “tank in the garden” is not one of those problems. Furthermore, if we are so concerned about military hardware being used against us, it scarcely seems a wise “solution” to arm a government to the teeth, and disarm ourselves proportionately.

If people are afraid of the “tank in the garden,” all they have to do is ensure that their DRO contract contains protections against well-armed neighbors. How can this be achieved? Well, when my wife and I bought our house, we signed a contract stipulating that we were not to repaint the outside of our house for a period of five years. I am sure that we would not have hesitated to sign the contract if it also included a ban on building tanks, nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers.

If someone does break their DRO contract by building such weapons, the DRO can invoke all of the exclusion and ostracism penalties discussed above.

Gun Control

Some people prefer to live in neighborhoods where there are no guns; some people prefer to live in neighborhoods where everyone has a gun – and some people do not particularly care one way or the other. Anarchism perfectly satisfies everyone’s preferences in this area. If you are a developer building a new neighborhood, you can require everyone buying a house to sign a contract promising to refrain from owning a gun. The enforcement possibilities for this are endless, but need not be intrusive – if I were a DRO and wanted to prevent gun ownership, I would simply revoke my contract with anyone who used or showed a gun in the neighborhood – including acts of self-defense.

On the other hand, I could build a neighborhood which required that everyone be willing to have and know how to use a gun – as is already the case in Switzerland. If I believe that gun ownership in a net positive, I would buy a house in this neighborhood.

Ah, but what if you have a gun in the glove box of your car, and you are driving from neighborhood to neighborhood? Well, then, you are just taking a risk that if you are discovered, your DRO may revoke your contract, just as if you carry a concealed weapon against the law in a statist society. Or they may not care about drivers.

In general, it seems very likely that few if any gun restrictions would be in place in a stateless society. The level of crime would be at least 90% lower than it is today; children would grow up happier, better educated and more secure – and of course you do not need to actually own a gun in order to gain the protective benefits of gun ownership. A thief who wants to break into your house does not know in advance whether you have a gun or not – if everyone is legally disarmed, then he can be quite sure that you do not. However, in a stateless society, there are no “laws” against gun ownership, except those that people enter into voluntarily. If a large number of thieves somehow figure out how to operate in an anarchic society, they will inevitably be drawn to those neighborhoods which have anti-gun contracts, so they will face less risk during their robberies. If these crimes become prevalent, then randomized gun ownership would be the most optimal solution – if these crimes remain extraordinarily rare, as is most likely the case, insofar as only the mentally ill would attempt them, then gun ownership would become an unnecessary overhead, and would very likely decline to almost nothing. There would still be people who would own guns, but they would be a small minority of eccentric collectors, like those who collect medieval swords – legacies of a brutal past that has long since faded into history.

Part 3: Examples

Roads

The question of roads always seems to arise as a central objection to a stateless society – which makes perfect sense in a way, because it is a form of public ownership that we have all experienced firsthand, and because it can be hard to picture what they may look like in the absence of a government.

The alternative to state-funded roads is generally conceived to be toll-based roads. This is considered a disastrous solution, because who wants to stop every block to put a quarter in a meter?

Remembering our methodology from above, it is essential that we put ourselves into the mind of a road developer, sitting on the other side of that table, attempting to sell us access to his roads.

Imagine that you have sunk your life savings into building a complicated network of roads. If you don’t attract drivers who are willing to pay to use them, you are finished – your children are going to cry themselves to sleep with hunger.

When you stand up to make a presentation to a group of potential customers – drivers – are you seriously going to tell them that in order to drive a half a mile to pick up a loaf of bread, they are going to have to stop a few times to put quarters into a toll meter?

Of course not.

So – how are you going to convince drivers to use your roads?

For those who have not spent any time – or blood – in the entrepreneurial world, this is exactly how almost all companies are funded. You take your business venture to a group of investors, who play a very serious game of “devil’s advocate,” trying to find holes in your business plan.

If your entire fortune hung in the balance, how would you answer these objections? If you cannot provide good answers, you will never get to sell your roads.

I am certainly no expert in construction – I was an entrepreneur in the software world – but I can tell you some possible answers that I would explore in order to prepare for such a meeting. I can also tell you that none of them would involve having drivers stop every few minutes to push change into a slot.

If I desperately wanted to build roads in a stateless society, I would first approach construction companies who wanted to build houses or malls in some area not currently served by a road. If you want to build a mall a few miles out of town, you’re not likely to attract many investors unless your business plan includes road access to the mall, since there are very few people who enjoy the prospect of a bracing hike to and from a “Target” store.

If you are developing a housing complex, you will face exactly the same requirement – it is true that you can sell houses without road access, but you will not be able to sell them for more than it costs to build them.

So there are really two kinds of roads, in two kinds of environments – highways and intercity roads, and already-existing and new roads.

New Roads

It is easy for us to understand that highways to new places will be built in the free market, for the simple reason that if you cannot build a highway to that new place, that new place will never come into existence. Secondly, there is not much point building a highway to a new housing development, without building roads from the highway to and within the housing development.

Thus, anything that is built that is new will only be built if roads to access it are constructed at the same time.

If I want to buy a new house somewhere outside of town, and a new highway and new roads are built to accommodate my desire, I will certainly be very interested in the long-term quality of the roads that have been built, since so much of my property’s value hinges upon easy and comfortable access to it.

Thus, the long-term quality of these roads will be a significant factor – probably a deciding one – in my decision to buy a house. Road quality is as important as the house’s construction quality when it comes to evaluating the value of a property. How much would you pay for a million-dollar mansion in the middle of the Amazon forest, with no road access? Assuming you are not Howard Hughes, probably nothing at all.

What about the danger that someone sells me a house, and then jacks up the price of the road maintenance?

Knowing that this is a risk, when I was negotiating my mortgage, I would ensure that a built-in and fixed price for road maintenance was included in my mortgage terms. I would also want the right to demand an open bid on road maintenance services when the contract came up for renewal.

We can all understand that the construction and maintenance of new buildings – commercial or residential – can only occur with high quality road access. (We can see this kind of phenomenon, to a smaller degree, in the fact that almost no malls are built without parking spaces, or houses without driveways and garages.)

So really, the question of road construction and maintenance – as far as it is raised as an objection to a stateless society – only hinges on existing roads, not new ones.

The Statist Pony

Imagine some communist country which provided out of the public purse a pony for each girl on her sixteenth birthday. Now, imagine that some crazy capitalist thinker came along and said that this country should switch from communism to the free market.

Naturally, just about everyone would then demand: “But how will each girl get a free pony on her sixteenth birthday?”

Of course, the answer is that she will not – but it may very well be asked whether the pony is really such an absolute necessity for every girl.

Government roads are just such a kind of “statist pony” – they are extravagantly wasteful, badly planned and allocated, and facilitate all sorts of dangerous and inefficient behaviors, just like every other government program on the planet. There is thus no possibility that a free market system of roads will look exactly the same as a statist system – because drivers will have to pay for road use directly, rather than offloading the total costs to taxpayers as a whole.

Thus when picturing a free system of roads, the question becomes: what will we as drivers be happy to pay for?

Certainly we will pay for safety, which we currently do not receive. We get jolting and wasteful traffic lights instead of gentle and fluid roundabouts. We get endless predatory ticketing instead of road systems that promote safety. We get endless construction that does not take place in the dark of night, but rather in the agonizing slow motion of rush hour. We get a sagging expansion of our cities, because developers do not have to pay for the costs of the roads that lead to their houses, office buildings, factories and shopping malls. We get eighteen-wheeler trucks blaring and rocketing beside small passenger cars. We do not see businesses adapting to the monetary and social costs of rush hour, because they do not face increased demand in wages because traveling in rush-hour costs more. Thus everyone has to start at nine a.m. or thereabouts.

Like every other government program, roads and traffic control are run for the profit of special interests – construction companies, unions, bureaucrats and cops, primarily – and not for the sake of the end users, the drivers. The tens of thousands of deaths – and hundreds of thousands of injuries – that occur annually in the United States alone, would be a completely unacceptable body count in any private industry. Experiments such as roundabouts, removing traffic signs and lanes, charging a premium for high-volume traffic and so on – all of which have been proven to increase efficiency and safety – simply do not spread across the system, any more than salmon steaks showed up in your average Stalinist store.

Existing City Roads

No matter what happens to the highway system in general, we all appreciate that city roads have to be maintained. How can this happen without a toll at every corner?

If we look at the average downtown core, it is largely composed of shops and businesses. Is it beyond the pale of human thought to imagine that the stores and businesses on a particular city block would be able to get together and all chip in for a relatively modest fund to maintain the roads and sidewalks around them – particularly when they no longer have to pay property and profit taxes to the State?

If we do believe that this is impossible, then we face exactly the same problem that we faced before about democracy. The central idea of democracy is that citizens are able to put aside their own petty personal self-interest and vote according to their conscience, with an eye to the collective good of society. If we accept that human beings are capable of voting in this way, then surely we can accept that they can put a few bucks a month into a common pot to pay for the roads that bring customers and employees to them. If we do not think that human beings can organize themselves to take care of a few hundred meters of roads that they directly benefit from, then they will never be able to vote for political candidates with any thought for the common good, and democracy must be abolished.

Either way, we end up with a stateless society.

There are, of course, many other ways to charge for roads in a free society. GPS tracking devices can effortlessly monitor the movements of cars, and a single bill can be sent, and the proceeds apportioned out to the road companies involved.

Furthermore, non-dangerous advertising could very easily subsidize the cost of roads – one possibility that springs to mind is radio commercials that would be inserted into programs based on the location of drivers, so that they did not provide visual distractions.

A Predatory Road Monopoly?

All right, you may say, but what about the reality that highways – and city roads – are extremely non-competitive situations, since no one is going to build a highway next to another highway and compete with it?

That is somewhat true, although it is important to be precise in terms of what is meant by the word “competition.”

Brad Pitt has a monopoly on Brad Pitt – or at least, he did before he got married. However, Brad Pitt still faces competition – not just with other actors, but rather with everything else that human beings could be doing instead of going to see a Brad Pitt movie. He competes with bowling, sex, napping, reading books on anarchy – everything you could imagine! Thus, although he has a monopoly on Brad Pitt, he does not have a monopoly on you. (That is the difference between the government and the free market – the government does have a monopoly on you, because it initiates the use of force against you.)

In the same way, any particular highway may have a monopoly on getting from A to B in the straightest line – but that does not mean that it has a coercive and exclusive hold over everyone’s entire decision-making processes.

Let us take an example of an “evil capitalist highway robber baron” named Jacques, who decides to start jacking up the rates for any driver using his highway.

First of all, Jacques will not be making this decision in a vacuum. After roads become privatized, everyone who buys a house who relies on a particular highway will be fully aware of their vulnerability to increased road tolls in the future. As an enterprising construction capitalist, I would sweeten the pot for people in this regard by negotiating a twenty year guarantee with Jacques that he would not raise their prices any more than one or two percentage points a year. (This highlights again a very essential aspect of understanding how a stateless society works, which is that obvious worries will always be addressed and alleviated ahead of time. If people are afraid that someone is going to jack up their road prices, they will simply negotiate fixed fees ahead of time – which is the essence of mortgages and car payments of course.)

However, let us imagine that no binding contracts limit Jacques’s ability to raise his prices, and one day he announces that his rates are going to triple.

What happens then?

Well, people are not about to move because the price of their road travel is going up, so that is not likely to be an issue – what they will do, however, is go to their bosses and say that they need a raise.

Bosses – having been one myself – are notoriously cheap individuals, who do not want to pay a penny more than they have to for what they want. If I were a boss in this situation, I would explore other alternatives to giving raises.

For instance, I might offer them a day or two a week to work at home. Alternatively, since no doubt Jacques’s prices are higher during rush-hour, I would also offer more flexible hours to those who wanted them, so that they would not have to pay a premium to come to work at a specific time.

If I were another kind of entrepreneur, I would set up a website dedicated to helping people find carpooling, so that people would end up paying less.

Also, the increased prices per vehicle might very well make it economically viable to start running buses along the highway.

In this way, Jacques might gain a temporary increase in his revenues, but consumers would simply adapt to his increased prices, in such a way that this increase could not be both significant and permanent.

In other words, by drastically raising his prices, all that Jacques is really doing is teaching people to find alternatives to using his highway. He is training them to avoid his service – and one of the terrible aspects of this practice is that once people get used to working at home or car pooling, not all of them will revert to their old habits if he drops his prices.

Jacques also creates another significant risk, which can easily escape the inexperienced eye.

By increasing the price of his highway, Jacques has reduced the collective wealth of entire neighborhoods to a far greater degree than he has increased his own wealth specifically. Of course, no one expects Jacques to be motivated by some abstract considerations of social wealth, but nonetheless he is creating a very dangerous situation.

Almost all neighborhoods have some sort of Business Association, where members meet to discuss a variety of collective concerns. This Association will certainly meet – and pointedly not invite Jacques – a day or two after he jacks up his prices, in order to figure out what they should do. They will likely decide to ostracize Jacques, which will certainly have a negative effect on his ability to move with ease and profit in the business world, since so many deals are consummated through existing relationships.

It is very possible that this form of business ostracism will cost Jacques more than he can possibly make by raising his rates, especially after the inevitable consumer adaptation.

However, perhaps Jacques doesn’t care about these particular business relationships – it does not matter, his ability to do business is still irretrievably harmed.

Whomever Jacques wants to do business with next will be fully aware that he has a habit of outrageously jacking up his prices without warning. Therefore, if someone has a choice about doing business with Jacques, he will very likely refrain.

Anyone who does end up wanting to – or having to – do business with Jacques will have to do far more due diligence and legal wrangling than before his fears were elevated by Jacques’s deleterious and unpredictable business practices.

Thus it is enormously unlikely that jacking up his prices will end up having a permanent and positive effect on Jacques’s profits.

However, to take the argument to its extreme case, let us say that Jacques does somehow end up creating a permanent and positive enormous profit.

His actions have created a large number of business people who have a direct interest in reducing those prices again – all those people whose property values and business expenses have been negatively impacted by Jacques’s price increase.

The Business Association members would be highly motivated to plot and execute a takeover of Jacques’s highway business, in order to restore their own property and business values. Whatever debts they may incur in this process will be more than recompensed by the increase in these values. Since the personal profits that Jacques is accruing remain far less than the collective costs he is inflicting on others, he remains highly vulnerable and exposed to a takeover bid, either hostile or friendly.

Of course, the Business Association members are unlikely to be experts at running a highway, so they would more likely act as investors for competing highway companies, to fund an expansion takeover, on the condition that this new company would guarantee a return to the original rates, along with a longer-term guarantee of reasonable rate increases.

Thus in general the instability, customer alienation, ostracism and endless competitive risks introduced by sudden and large price increases do not pay off at all, and in fact threaten the viability of the business as a whole. In the example above, we have simplified the scenario by pretending that Jacques can make all of these decisions on his own, which would never be the case in any free market. Any industry that has a potential for a monopoly would require a large amount of capital investment and management, which comes with stockholders, investors, and a board of directors. Jacques would not have the right or the ability to make significant decisions about price without the support of the majority of the interested stakeholders – all of whom would view, and quite rightly too, the jacking up of prices as far too threatening to the long-term value of their investment.

My Way or the Highway?

We could imagine a scenario where Jacques is able to build a $500 million dollar highway out of his own pocket, because he has inherited billions or something like that – but it seems very unlikely that his venture would succeed in the long run, because people would be hesitant to get into business with someone who does not have a multitude of other interested parties to temper his judgment, and who retains a tyrannical level of control over his own organization. For instance, people do not want to get heavily involved in a company without a succession plan, and having a single “dictator” in a company does not bode well for its long-term success. If Jacques is not actively grooming a number of successors, and if he then gets hit by a bus, no one will be able to step into his shoes, and his company will fail. This level of risk would be too high for most other companies, since it would take a number of years to build his highway, and Jacques’s company could collapse at any time, leaving bills unpaid and orders unfulfilled. If Jacques insisted upon these conditions, all that he would be revealing would be his own lack of business judgment, which would also cause more experienced businesspeople to shy away from getting involved with him. Thus it seems exceedingly unlikely that Jacques would be able to build such a capital-intensive structure while retaining dictatorial control over the company.

I do apologize for the detailed and somewhat technical nature of the above explanation, but I do think that it is essential to understand that there are always two sides to every negotiation. In a free society, there are a near-infinite set of options available to peacefully address what could be considered sub-optimal business practices on the part of others.

Automobile Insurance

Finally, let us look at how the provision of automobile insurance would affect the safety of roads.

In most Western countries, automobile insurance is compulsory – I believe that this would continue to be the case in practice, if not in principle, in a free society.

I would much prefer to use someone’s roads if I could know for certain that all the other drivers carried insurance. Thus it seems very likely that insurance would be required for anyone traveling on a road. (How could this be enforced? A number of options spring to mind, most notably that currency companies would not process gas purchases from uninsured drivers.)

Naturally, the fewer car accidents there are, the more car insurance companies can make in profit. This direct correlation is one of the core foundations to the achievement of security in a stateless society. If, say, Jacques’s roads are unsafe, then the car insurance companies will charge a premium for anyone who wants to drive on them – thus cutting into Jacques’s profits considerably. This will drive Jacques to invest in road improvements.

At the moment, insurance companies have no direct control over government road policies, and so these companies can only compete on price, not on the proactive promotion of road safety. However, when competition for roads heats up through privatization – and remember, the competition is not just between different road systems, but also between using roads and not using them – insurance companies will be forced to compete on creating the safest possible roads, in order to keep their prices as low as possible.

When the costs of roads are directly borne by the drivers, the benefits are both staggering and almost limitless. Without the ability to externalize the cost of roads to other taxpayers, drivers can make more informed and rational decisions about the costs and benefits of driving. Where to live, how far to commute, whether to drive in rush hour, whether to use public transit, whether to carpool, whether to work from home – all of these decisions are fundamentally driven by cost, but in a statist society, these decisions almost always turn out to be disastrous, because the simple and rational efficiency of the price mechanism is not allowed to function, to the detriment of resource consumption, the health of the environment, and the quality of life for literally hundreds of millions of people.

 An example of private roads

If I were to say that roads should not only be provided by the free market, but also that they should be enclosed under a roof, cooled in the summer and heated in the winter, that all stairs should in fact be escalators, that all corners should be landscaped with plants and fountains, and patrolled by security guards – surely you would say that this would be an outlandish standard, which could never be achieved in the free market.

Well – that is exactly what a mall is.

Never underestimate what the free market can provide.

Health Care

The provision or subsidization of health care is considered a foundational justification for State power, for a number of seemingly compelling reasons.

First of all, health care expenses can be both unexpected and enormous. Secondly, people undergoing an acute health crisis are scarcely in a position to negotiate, haggle and wait. If you have been hit by a bus, and are bleeding out, you will not barter with whoever arrives to treat your injuries. Thirdly, health care providers are generally considered to be in a difficult position, insofar as they almost never refuse to treat someone who arrives in the emergency room, whether that person can pay or not. Fourthly, people have certain reservations or fears about the trustworthiness of medical advice, and so wish to ensure the quality and consistency of the instructions they receive. Finally, since doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare providers currently profit from illness, rather than health, the incentives are considered reversed, in that pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are motivated to deliver medication, rather than discover alternatives to medication or prevent the problem in the first place.

The “solution” to the above problems has almost always been the creation and expansion of State power over the medical field. In all Western democracies except the United States, this has resulted in the socialization of medicine, or the creation of a fundamentally communist monopoly that is funded by the taxes generated through the efficiency and productivity of the free market. Those who are healthy are forced at gunpoint to pay for those who are sick. Furthermore, the State regulates the licensing of health care providers, creating significant legal barriers to entry to doctors, nurses and other practitioners.

The imperative of providing health care – the axiom that it is a “right” – is considered a justification for the violence of the State in a way that trumps just about every other consideration. Even those who would be willing to accept the substitution of private charities for public welfare find themselves hard-pressed to defend the idea that health care should be a for-profit industry, because of the fear that, as the song goes, “the rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor…”

Every empathetic person feels the utmost compassion for an innocent child born with some form of correctable birth defect, to poor parents perhaps, who might require tens of thousands of dollars of expert help to correct the problem. The sheer random misfortune of such a disaster truly stirs us with sympathy, because we all understand that this wounded child could easily have been us, or our own child.

Similarly, those who are born with some genetic or congenital disorder are also “unjustly” inflicted with additional medical costs, through no fault of their own. A child whose teeth just happen to grow crooked requires thousands of dollars more in dental work than a child whose teeth just happen to grow straight.

When a person is struck down by an unexpected, unanticipated or inevitable medical condition – as will happen to all of us, in the case of death itself – it feels excruciating to imagine that they would have to debate costs and benefits. Particularly in the case of parents, having to choose between the best medical care for a sick child, and the medical care that they can afford, seems brutal and inhumane. Michael Moore’s documentary “Sicko,” for instance, opened with the story of a man who, it is claimed, had to choose between replacing one finger or another, but could not afford both.

The vulnerability and fear that accompanies significant medical ailments should, we feel, not also be combined with cold calculations about costs and benefits. Should a man with cancer be forced to choose between chemotherapy and eating? Surely a just and compassionate society should do everything within its power to avoid inflicting such stark and ghastly choices upon its citizens.

Furthermore, since medical advice can be truly a matter of life or death, a compassionate society should take every conceivable step to ensure that medical practitioners go through a rigorous process of training and evaluation. Again, the vulnerability and fear involved in medical decisions should never be exacerbated by fears that the self-interest of the medical practitioner is not directly aligned with the self-interest of the patient.

Anarchism and Medical Care

There is no question that human beings are not possessed by innate sainthood. Doctors can be abrupt, greedy, false and treacherous. Patients, as well, can be difficult, obstructive, non-compliant, litigious and hypochondriacal. They can fake injuries in order to gain unjust benefits, and can also become addicted to certain medications such as painkillers, and become dangerously manipulative.

Anarchism recognizes the empirical reality of human corruption in a way that statism simply does not. Anarchists recognize that power corrupts, while statists forever believe that power is the cure for corruption. Anarchists understand that the only valid and proven way to oppose human corruption is through voluntarism and competition – statists believe that the only way to oppose human corruption is to create a monopoly of violent power.

Fundamentally, anarchists believe that virtue results from a marketplace of voluntary interactions – statists believe that virtue is a dictatorial compulsion, created and maintained at the point of a gun.

Ideally, no matter what your political convictions, we can all recognize that medical care should be:

1. Focused on prevention, rather than cure;
2. As cheap as possible;
3. As competent as possible;
4. As accessible as possible;
5. Aligned with the interests of the patient.

Existing Systems

A basic law of economics is that whatever you subsidize, increases; and whatever you tax, decreases.

Statist health care “systems” follow the basic model that the doctor does not get paid when you are healthy, but only gets paid when you are sick.

In other words, the doctor has no direct economic incentive to prevent illness, but every incentive to treat it.

In statist health care systems, the doctor is paid per patient visit, not for a successful cure. Thus doctors do not make their money from curing patients, but rather from seeing patients – thus they have every economic incentive to keep consultations as short as possible, and to outsource any complicated “cures.”

Furthermore, in socialized medical systems in particular, it is actually illegal to collect and publish information about the quality and success rates of doctors. If I find out that I have prostate cancer, I cannot possibly find out which doctor has the greatest or best success rate in curing it. (More importantly, if I have a family history of prostate cancer, I cannot find out which doctor has been most successful in preventing it from occurring.)

When you sit back and really think about it, this is staggering – absolutely staggering!

It is illegal to sell a food item without publishing the nutritional information. It is illegal to run a public company without publishing your financial information. It is illegal to sell a car without publishing its fuel efficiency. Hell, it is illegal to sell an item of clothing without publishing where it was made.

Every stupid and irrelevant piece of information is required by law – but the success rates of doctors are not only not required, but you will actually go to jail for collecting and publishing this information!

Why is that?

This information is violently banned in most countries for two simple reasons – firstly, in any socialized system, this information would cause a stampede of sick people towards the most effective doctors. Since access to a doctor cannot be determined by price, the waiting times for good doctors would increase exponentially, while the incomes of bad doctors would decrease. Voters would go largely insane if they could not get access to the most competent doctors, and would demand immediate changes in the system. Unfortunately, the only way to limit general access to specific doctors in a socialist medical system is to allow those doctors to raise their prices – thus eliminating the communist aspect of the system.

The second reason that this information is unavailable in most medical systems is that it is already available to particular individuals, who specifically do not want it to be shared among the general population.

“Two-Tiered” Health Care

Whenever the “specter” of privatized medical care is raised, every pundit on the planet starts wailing about the evils of a “two-tiered” medical system. Basically, this is the fear that if elements of privatization are introduced to a public health care system, all the good doctors will flee to the private sector, leaving a dilapidated public area.

The fascinating aspect of this scare story is that these same pundits genuinely do not seem to imagine that a “tiered” medical system does not already exist within a socialized environment.

There are in fact four tiers in a socialized medical system; the first is inhabited by rich and prominent people, such as politicians, media personalities, pundits and so on – who do not wait in line to get MRIs or consultations with the top specialists in the field. These people inhabit a sort of “Potemkin village” of “show medicine,” and are never allowed to fall through the cracks, for fear that they may write about or describe the true realities of the system. Those in the know will direct these people to the most competent medical specialists, and ensure that they are ushered into private consultations without the indignity of having sit in a waiting room. These patients then inevitably move to the front of the line for treatment, and remain immensely satisfied with the public health care system, because they do not actually have to deal with it, but rather remain quite happy to have everyone else pay for their elite private medical care.

The second tier is composed of those who are inside – or at least near – the medical profession itself. A gentleman I know who is a psychologist received the bad news that his father had colon cancer. Because he was relatively close to the medical profession, he could call on friends and immediately find out who was the best specialist in town for this disease. Then, he introduced himself to this doctor, saying that he was a friend of so-and-so, and thus inevitably vaulted to the front of the line – and this special treatment followed his father all the way through his diagnosis and chemotherapy. He always got the best doctors, and he rarely had to wait. This is not because doctors are evil, or innately corrupt, or anything like that, but rather because it is very uncomfortable to refuse a favor to a friend – and it is in fact easier to gather and keep friends when you can do favors for them, because then they will inevitably do favors for you as well.

The third tier is composed of rich people without political or medical contacts who can fly overseas for medical treatment, to the US or other more market-driven health care environments.

The fourth tier is composed of those who are not prominent, or do not wield power, are not rich, and who also do not have contacts within or near the medical profession. These hapless souls shuffle through the public health care maze, consistently displaced by those with more power, unable to gain even a scrap of information about the quality of the care that they are receiving, waiting with numb hope for the system to grace them with an appointment, with x-rays, with treatment, with advice – lost, helpless, dependent, frightened, ignorant – with no more actual “rights” than a forgotten cow lodged in a stall awaiting antibiotics.

Since a doctor is paid to see as many of these people as possible, he will impatiently rush them through his office, spending a documented average of about eighteen seconds listening to their symptoms – and by far his most common treatment option will be to write a prescription, or refer the patient to a specialist.

There are three main reasons that he writes a prescription; the first is that it gets the patient out of his office as quickly as possible, as well as transferring the bulk of any potential liability to the pharmaceutical company. The second reason, which is directly related to first, is that pharmaceutical companies shower him with gifts and trips and seminars in order to promote their medications. The third reason is that a patient can be seen very rapidly if he or she is only coming in to get a refill of the prescription – “Are you still experiencing the same symptoms? Very well, here you go!” – thus ensuring continued high-volume billing.

Of course, referring a patient to a specialist is also a very rapid way of getting him out of your office, thus maintaining your billing rate.

The Anarchist “Solution”?

Imagine if I suggested the following as the solution to the problem of how to deliver healthcare in a stateless society:

The way that I see it working is this: one DRO should amass enough weaponry to violently drive all other medical DROs out of business. This DRO should then take about twenty percent of people’s income – and kidnap or shoot them if they do not give up their money – and then provide health care as it sees fit. This same DRO should also have complete control over how many doctors there are, and how a doctor should be trained, and how a doctor should be paid. Again, if anyone attempts to become a doctor without following the detailed and lengthy rules of this DRO, they can be kidnapped and/or shot. This DRO should pay doctors per patient visit, to ensure that doctors would see as many patients as possible in any given day – and it should make sure that doctors are neither paid for successful treatments, nor penalized for any unsuccessful treatments. Doctors should not make any money whatsoever by preventing illness, but rather should get paid for treating as many illnesses as possible, as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, this DRO monopoly should be able to shoot or kidnap anyone who dares to collect and publicize any information about the success rates of its doctors.

In order to ensure that citizen feedback is available to this DRO, every couple of years, citizens should be able to appoint a representative of their choice to the Board of Directors. Whoever they choose should be paid by the existing doctors that the DRO controls, or by the pharmaceutical companies…

We could continue with this example, but I think that you can see the ridiculousness of this “solution.” If I put this forward as my answer, I would receive an unbelievable tsunami of incredulous and contemptuous e-mails, wondering just what particular drugs I had been on when I described this as the best possible solution to the problem of providing health care.

Inevitably – and again, ludicrously – these same people will also deluge me with incredulous and contemptuous e-mails when I suggest privatizing the provision of health care.

How It Doesn’t Work: An Analogy

In socialized medicine – as in any socialized or communistic system – the consumers are not the customers. I talked about this in terms of academia in my previous book, “Everyday Anarchy,” but this reality has far more dire consequences in the realm of health care.

If automobile manufacturers were paid to produce automobiles by politicians, rather than by consumers, it is easy to imagine what the results would be. Since consumer input would be almost nonexistent, the preferences and needs of the consumer would have almost no effect on what was produced.

If this statist monopoly also supported and protected a monopolistic public sector union, can we imagine what the efficiency and productivity of these workers would be?

What if these manufacturers were paid by the number of cars that were delivered, not the quality of each car? Can we imagine what would happen to the wheels when we attempted to drive the cars off the lot?

What if these car manufacturers were also heavily subsidized by the oil and gasoline industries –and those subsidies were directly proportional to the inefficient fuel consumption of their cars? Can we imagine that they would build energy-efficient cars, or would they want to increase their income by building inefficient cars?

Does anyone ever suggest that we should nationalize car production? Yet it is impossible to have a health care system without cars – or at least ambulances – since there is no easy way to deliver doctors, medicines or patients without cars.

(We could easily make the same arguments about the software and computer industry, with even more deleterious results!)

It is hard to imagine why we would create such a horrendous system for health care, while rejecting it as ridiculous and inefficient in terms of car production.

Surely our health is far more important than our cars.

Any time a coercive agency intervenes on behalf of the consumer, that coercive agency then immediately and permanently becomes the consumer, and the needs and desires of the actual consumer are almost entirely eliminated from the equation.

How It Will Work

Ever since Blaise Pascal discovered the laws of probability, a singular human institution has arisen to help people deal with unpredictable risk – insurance.

Insurance is simply a way of playing the law of averages in order to create predictability. If one out of a hundred people is going to be randomly hit with a ten thousand dollar bill, it makes sense for everyone to have the option of paying a fixed amount of money in order to be insured against such a bill.

(Please note that in this section, I am talking about the free market insurance companies of the future, not the mercantilist semi-statist monsters of the present.)

The wonderful thing about insurance is that the interests of consumers are almost exactly aligned with the interests of providers, since both are directly motivated by the desire to decrease risk.

If I take out insurance against the dangers of smoking, the insurance company only has to pay out if I get sick from smoking – thus the insurance company will inevitably reduce my rates if I quit. In the same way, if I have taken out insurance against the danger and expense of diabetes, my insurance company will charge me less if I lose weight.

(To be slightly more precise, the insurance company does not exactly want me to quit smoking, but rather wants to make money out of insuring me. An insurance company can as easily make money insuring smokers as it can non-smokers – however, insurance companies know that customers are more likely to stay if their rates can be reduced, which means creating incentives to quit smoking.)

Every sane individual prefers to prevent an illness rather than cure it – and this is exactly the same motivation that drives insurance companies as well, since they make the most profit from healthy people, rather than sick people.

Thus, in a free society, insurance companies provide two essential services – one that you have to pay for, and one that you get for free.

The service that you get for free is an objective and detailed risk analysis of various lifestyle options. If you want to know how dangerous hang gliding is, all you have to do is apply for insurance, tell them that you are a hang glider, and see what happens to your rates. You do not have to sign up in order to gain detailed information about the risks your habits and hobbies incur – all you have to do is apply. Insurance companies are invaluable sources of information about relative risk, since their entire livelihood is based upon a rational and sustainable evaluation of risk.

The service that you have to pay for is the alleviation of risk by spreading it around.

(This is an enormous topic, but I would briefly like to mention that any discussion of free-market health-care provision – and insurance companies in particular – will doubtless draw comparisons to the existing system within the United States. This “system” has very little to do with the free market, in that more than fifty cents of every health care dollar is spent by the government, which violently protects a monopolistic doctor’s union called the American Medical Association, and also hyper-regulates the medical field with literally hundreds of thousands of laws, rules, directives and requirements. The incentive of private profit, combined with the corrupt largesse of a public purse, is technically called “fascism,” rather than freedom.)

In terms of health care, then, we can be sure that your insurance company wants to keep you as healthy as possible. The farmer who sells cows is interested in their long-term health, in a way that the butcher who disassembles them is not.

Due to this motivation, private insurance companies will be reasonably proactive in attempting to prevent health problems from developing, rather than merely curing them after they have occurred. They will be sure to pay doctors first for prevention, and then for successful cures, rather than for merely cycling as many patients through their offices as humanly possible.

In any situation where lifestyle choices can ameliorate health problems, those will be chosen in preference to endless medication. It does not cost the insurance company any money if you go for a walk or do some sit-ups; it does if you have to be on insulin for the rest of your life.

Conversely, medication is in general cheaper than surgery, all other things being equal, and so effective medications will be researched, developed and prescribed more often than invasive and dangerous surgery.

Healthcare Information

Spending money on a pricey doctor is probably about the most cost-effective investment you will ever make. The most effective doctors are those who cure the most efficiently – and for sure, most customers of health care insurance would also purchase life insurance from the same company, so that any disastrously failed “cures” would cost the company an enormous amount of money.

In this way, returning a customer to health not only guarantees future health care payments, but it also postpones the payment of death benefits. In this way, the self-interest of the insurance company is directly aligned with the self-interest of the customer, who doubtless does not prefer to be either sick, or dead. If the doctor is also paid to prevent, cure and keep alive, then all three parties have the same goal, which is the polar opposite of any statist system.

Thus whenever anyone starts evaluating which health care insurance company to go with, each company would be tripping over themselves to provide independently verified statistics about the long-term health of their customers – the number of ailments prevented, identified and cured; the average life expectancy, successful pregnancies and births and so on. These companies would be selling health to you, rather than inflicting repetitive treatments on you, which is the case with socialized medicine.

The proactive and dedicated partnership between insurance company and customer – designed to serve the self-interest of each – would create a very positive and prevention-based healthcare approach. In the same way that companies that sell dental insurance require you to go for bi-annual checkups, proactive insurance companies would require regular health checkups. (I have experienced this directly in my career. Most investors require senior managers to be insured against illness, to protect their investment – in order to qualify for this, I had to go through a full checkup by a private agency, which reviewed my blood work, my history, and ran a wide battery of tests.)

In this way, the self-interest of the doctor – who normally gets paid for treatment, not cure – and that of the patient, who prefers prevention rather than treatment – can be productively aligned.

Health Care and the Poor

It is not a subject that many people are particularly comfortable with, but charity can be a very complex and dangerous thing.

We certainly want to help the unfortunate, but we do not wish to enable and subsidize bad decisions – this is only part of the complexity involved in helping others – which a statist society cannot distinguish or deal with at all.

If society gave everything that a poor person could possibly require in order to live comfortably, that would scarcely reduce the numbers of poor people, but would rather increase them considerably. On the other hand, the children of poor people are scarcely responsible for any bad decisions their parents may have made – however, if charities give a lot of money to poor people with children, more poor people will tend to have more children, which will only increase poverty.

This balancing act is one of the enormous and complex challenges of true charity – and yet another reason why a violent monopoly will never end up helping the poor in any substantive or permanent manner.

When it comes to health care, there is no doubt whatsoever that the majority of people care about the provision of health care for those who cannot afford it. At a hospital I visited recently, I saw a placard on the wall thanking the five thousand volunteers who helped run the place.

Doctors as a whole will always treat someone who comes with an immediate injury, whether they can pay or not. If we assume that medical treatments for the genuinely deserving and needy poor would consume about ten percent of general health care spending, then we can be completely certain that this amount of money would be donated by concerned individuals, either in time or money. We can be certain of this because we know of a large number of religious organizations that require ten percent of people’s total income – twenty percent in fact, since this is pretax income – and people are quite happy to pay that.

Thus the medical needs of the poor would be entirely taken care of in a free society through charity and pro bono work. Charities would also compete to provide the most effective care for the poor, in order to gain the most donations. I would certainly prefer to give my money to an organization that was best able to create and provide sustainable health practices and medical treatments for the poor.

In this way, not only would the self-interest of doctors, insurance companies and customers be aligned – but also the self-interest of donators, charities and the poor they serve.

In a stateless society, the poor will be genuinely served by a far better system, composed of those whose self-interest is directly aligned with the health of the poor.

As has been shown over and over again, throughout history and across the world, benevolent self-interest, enhanced by free association and voluntary competition, is the only way to create sustainable compassion within society.

I am aware that I have not answered all possible objections to the question of how health care is provided in a free society. I am also aware that the possibility always exists that people can “fall through the cracks,” or that charities could conceivably make mistakes, and either fund the wrong people, or fail to fund the right people.

Once more, this possibility of corruption and/or error is often considered to be an airtight argument against anarchy, when in fact it is an airtight argument for anarchy, and against statism.

Competition and voluntarism are the only known methodologies for repairing and opposing the inevitable errors and corruptions that constantly creep into human relations. The fact that human beings can make mistakes – and are always susceptible to corruption – is exactly why they should never be given a monopoly power of violence over others.

When an entrepreneur – whether charitable or for-profit – makes a mistake by failing to provide value – others will immediately rush in to provide the missing benefit. It is this constant process of challenge and competition that allows the best solutions to be consistently discovered and reinvented in an ever-changing world.

Stateless Prisons

One of the great challenges of anarchistic philosophy is the problem of prisons, or the physical restraint of violent criminals. Let us examine the punitive mechanisms that might exist in the absence of a coercive State system.

Firstly, we can assume that in the absence of a State, DROs will necessarily band together to deny the advantages of a modern economic life to those individuals who egregiously harm their fellow citizens. Such necessities as bank accounts, credit, transportation, lodging, food and so on, can all be withheld from those who have been proven to have committed violent crimes. Also, in a stateless society, since there is no such thing as “public” property, violent criminals would have a tough time getting anywhere, since roads, parks, forests and so on would all be privately owned. Anybody providing aid or comfort to a person convicted of a violent crime could face a withdrawal of services and protections from their own DRO, and so would avoid giving such help.

However, this solution alone has not been sufficient for some people, who still feel that sociopathic and violent criminals need to be physically restrained or imprisoned for society to be safe.

Before tackling this issue, I would like to point out that if the problem of violent sociopaths is very extensive, then surely any moral justifications for the existence of a State become that much more untenable. If society literally swarms with evil people, then those evil people will surely overwhelm the State, the police, and the military, and prey upon legally disarmed citizens to their hearts content. If, however, there are very few evil people, then we surely do not need a State to protect us from such a tiny problem. In other words, if there are a lot of evil people, we cannot have a State – and if there are few evil people, then we do not need a State.

Also, whenever punitive measures are discussed, fears arise about unjust punishments. What if DROs act against someone who has been wrongly convicted of a crime? Well, according to our usual methodology, we must remember to compare a stateless society not to some perfect utopia, but rather to existing statist societies. Are people currently unjustly sent to prison? You bet. Are non-violent drug users jailed? Yes, by the millions. Do some people pretend to confess to less grievous crimes because they are threatened with terrifying sentences if they do not? Of course. Do the police manufacture evidence? Yes. Are policemen rewarded for preventing crimes, or obtaining convictions? The latter.

And – are war criminals such as George Bush charged with their genocidal crimes? Of course not. They are given pensions and speaking tours.

If we live in a terrifyingly obese nation, saying we should not bother dieting because some thin people get diabetes is irrational to say the least.

The Rapist

Let us imagine what might happen to a rapist in a stateless society. All general DRO contracts will include “rape protection,” since DROs will want to avoid incurring the medical, psychological and income costs of a rape for one of their own customers. Part of “rape protection” will be the provision of significant financial restitution to a rape victim. (Women who can’t afford “rape protection” will be subsidized by charities – or lawyers will represent them pro bono in return for a cut of the restitution.)

If a woman gets raped, she then applies to her DRO for restitution. The DRO then finds her rapist – using the most advanced forensic techniques available – and sends an agent to knock on his door.

“Good morning, sir,” the agent will politely say. “You have been charged with rape, and I’m here to inform you of your options. We wish to make this process as painless and non-intrusive as possible for you, and so will schedule a trial at the time of your earliest convenience. If you do not attend this trial, or testify falsely, or attempt to flee, we shall apply significant sanctions against you, which are outlined in your existing DRO contract. Our agreement with your bank allows us to freeze your assets – except for basic living and legal expenses – the moment that you are charged with a violent crime. We also have agreements with airlines, road, bus and train companies, as well as gas stations, to prevent you from leaving town until this matter is resolved.

“You can represent yourself in this trial, choose from one of our lawyers, or we will pay for any lawyer you prefer, at standard rates. Also, as per our existing contract, we are to be allowed access to your home for purposes of investigation. You are free to deny us this access, of course, but then we shall assume that you are guilty of the crime, and will apply all the sanctions allowed to us by contract.

“If you are found to be innocent of this crime, we will pay you the sum of twenty thousand dollars, to be funded by the woman who has charged you with rape. We will also offer free psychological counseling for you, in order to help you avoid such accusers in the future.”

The trial will commence, and will return a verdict in due course. (It seems highly likely that lie-detectors will be admissible, since they are more than 90% accurate when used correctly, which is better than most witnesses. The reason that they are not admissible now is that they would make lawyers less valuable, and also would reveal the degree to which the State police lie.)

If the man is found guilty, he will receive another visit from his DRO representative.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the agent will say. “You have been found guilty of rape, and I’m here to inform you of your punishment. We have a reciprocal agreement with your bank, which has now put a hold on your accounts, and provided us limited access. We will be deducting double the costs of our investigation and trial from your funds, and will also be transferring half a million dollars to the woman that you raped. We are aware that you do not have sufficient funds to cover this cost, which we will address in a moment. We also have reciprocal agreements with the companies that provide water and electricity to your house, and those will now be cut off. Furthermore, no gas station will sell you gasoline, and no train station, airline or bus company will sell you a ticket. We have made arrangements with all of the local grocery stores to deny you service, either in person or online. If you set foot on the street outside your house, which is owned privately, you will be physically removed for trespassing. Your wife and children can leave at any time. If they have no place to go, we will cover their transition costs, and charge you for them.

“Of course, you have the right to appeal this sentence, and if you successfully appeal, we would transfer our costs to the woman who has accused you of rape, and pay you for the inconvenience we have caused you. If, however, your appeal fails, all additional costs will be added to your debt.

“I can tell you openly that if you choose to stay in your house, you will be unable to survive for very long. You will run out of food and water. You can attempt to escape your own house, of course, leaving all of your possessions. If you do successfully escape, be aware that you are now entered into a central registry, and no reputable DRO will ever represent you. Furthermore, all DROs which have reciprocal agreements with us – which is the vast majority of them – will withdraw services from their own customers if those customers provide you with any goods or services. For the rest of your life, it will be almost impossible for you to open a bank account, use centralized currency, carry a credit card, own a car, buy gas, use a road – or any other form of transportation – and gaining food, water and lodging will be a constant nightmare for you. You will spend your entire existence running, hiding and begging, and will never find peace, solace or comfort in any place.

“However, there is an option. If you come with me now, we will take you to a place of work for a period of ten years. During that time, you will be working for us in a capacity which will be determined by your skills. If you do not have any viable skills, we will train you. Your wages will go to us, and we will deduct the costs of your incarceration, as well as any of the costs I outlined above which are not covered by your existing funds. A small amount of your wages will be set aside to help get you started after your release.

“During your stay with us, we will do our utmost help you, because we do not want to have to go through all of this with again you in the future. You will take courses on ethics. You will take courses on anger management. You will take psychological counseling. You will emerge from your work term a far better person. And when you do emerge, all of your rights will be fully restored, and you will be able to participate once more in the economic and social life of society.

“You have a choice now, and I want you to understand the full ramifications of that choice. If you come with me now, this is the best offer that I can give you. If you decide to stay in your house, and later change your mind, the penalties will be far greater. If you escape, and later change your mind, the penalties will be greater still. In our experience, 99.99% of people who either run or stay end up changing their minds, and end up that much worse off. The remaining 0.01%? They commit suicide.

“The choice is now yours. Do the right thing. Do the wise thing. Come with me.”

Can we really imagine that anyone would choose to stay in his own house and die of thirst, unable to even flush his toilet? Can we imagine that anyone would choose a life of perpetual running and hiding and begging? Even if the rapist had no interest in becoming a better person, surely the cost/benefit of the options outlined above would convince him.

There will always be a small number of truly evil or insane people within society. There are far better ways of dealing with them than our existing system of dehumanizing, brutal and destructive State gulags, which generally serve only to expand their criminal intent, skills and contacts. Also, it is important to remember that the existing State prisons contain relatively few evil or insane people. The majority of those in jail are nonviolent offenders, enslaved and in chains because they used recreational drugs, or gambled, or went to a prostitute, or did not pay all their taxes, or other such innocuous nonsense – or turned to crime because State “vice” prohibitions made crime so profitable, and State “education” kept them so ignorant.

Our choice, then, is between a system which removes the tiny minority of evil people from society, rehabilitates them if all possible, and makes them work productively to support their own confinement – or a State system which spends most of its time and energies enslaving innocent people, while letting the evil and insane roam free – or become Commander in Chief.

Money

Another central justification for the existence of the State is the need for a stable and universal monetary system. In the absence of any general system for determining price and value, the argument goes, economic activity grinds to a standstill, since all that is left in the absence of cash and prices is self-sufficiency, barter and/or an inefficient command economy of some kind.

If the government stops defining and promulgating the money supply, the argument goes, money would cease to exist, and the economy would collapse. Every group would come up with their own definition of money, and at the mall, you would have to try to negotiate with people who were using diamonds, gold, shark teeth, salt, spices, DVDs and goodness knows what else as cash.

Our economic life would thus become an endless runaround of attempting to match a variety of currencies to a variety of products; the value of our salaries would be diminished – or perhaps eliminated – by the amount of labor that it would take to find someone who would accept our “currency.” Furthermore, given the enormous multiplicity of “currencies” in a stateless society, we would never be sure whether or not we were being ripped off in some manner, as someone tried to convince us that 12 shark’s teeth were in fact equal to our bag of cinnamon – and horror of horrors, we might get home and find out that those shark’s teeth were in fact fakes!

(I hope that we are far enough along in our understanding to recognize an “Argument from Apocalypse” when we see it!)

Like so many arguments against a stateless society, the above approach can be defined as the “idiot kindergarten” argument. In this view, society is composed of largely retarded adults, who find it impossible to cooperate for mutual advantage, but instead run around like chickens with their heads cut off, grabbing and snatching at whatever value they can, eyeing each other with suspicion and hostility, and probably eating glue and stuffing plasticine up their noses.

The essential thing to understand about money is that cash is just another product, exactly like an iPod, a car or a telephone line.

A telephone line is designed to facilitate communication in a “many to many” scenario – anyone who pays to access it can talk to anyone else who has paid to access it. From the standpoint of the consumer, a telephone line is an “invisible” medium for the exchange of conversation, from anyone, and to anyone.

In the same way, money is an “invisible” medium for the exchange of value in a market system. Money is only required because people wish to trade – I do not generally set a “market price” for the vegetables that I grow for my own consumption in my backyard. (Although my time certainly has a form of “price” of course…)

Money reflects the degree of actionable demand for goods and services – actionable because we all may want a Lamborghini, but very few of us actually have the money to purchase one.

Quite literally, money is a way of measuring apples versus oranges. How much of my economically productive time is a dozen oranges worth? How many oranges is a dozen apples worth? In the absence of money, the only alternative is direct trade, which is horribly inefficient, for the obvious reason that if I want to trade apples for oranges, I have to find someone who wants to trade oranges for apples.

Like any commodity, money has a price – and this price is called “interest.” If I want to rent a car, rather than buy it, then I do not have to outlay the entire capital cost of the car, but rather I can borrow the car (which really means borrowing the capital cost of the car, since someone else has to have already paid for it) and pay a rental fee.

In the same way, if I want to borrow money, then I have to pay a “rental fee,” which is interest, which equals the amount that I am willing to pay in order to have something sooner rather than later. “Interest” exists because time is the most precious commodity that we have, because it can never be replaced, and without it we are nothing.

I can save for 20 years in order to buy a house outright, but there is no particular value in that; it is true that if I take this approach, I have saved myself a loss of money and interest, but so what? I have only exchanged paying interest for paying rent on some other place to live – both of which are forms of non-recoverable income. Whether I hand my money to a bank or a landlord is immaterial.

If we are afraid that a stateless society will not be able to create or sustain any form of objective monetary system, then what we are really saying is that human beings will refuse to cooperate, even if their lack of cooperation means a complete collapse of the economic system, and the entire basis of their high living standard.

We can easily imagine that in the absence of cash, economic wealth and growth would collapse by probably 95%. Let us say that the average annual income of a developed economy is about $35,000 a year – when we reject a stateless society for fear that it cannot sustain a monetary system, we are really saying that human beings would accept an annual drop in income from $35,000 to $1,750 rather than cooperate with each other.

To put it another way, if I were willing to pay you $33,250 a year – the difference between living in a mud shack and living in a comfortable home, between near starvation and having more than enough food, between plumbing and an outhouse – in order to cooperate with other human beings, would you say “no”?

Of course not.

If human beings do not possess enough rational self-interest to accept a 20 fold increase in their income simply for the sake of participating in some reasonable monetary system, then philosophy, medicine and society of any kind would be utterly impossible, and you would not be able to read this, because you would have said to yourself that the effort of learning how to read is not worth it.

I apologize if I am hammering the point perhaps too hard, but another way of understanding this is to imagine the following scenario.

The Anarchist Credit Card

Let us say that you make $35,000 a year, and one day, you get a letter in the mail from the Anarchist Credit Card Company:

Dear [You]:

We have a very exciting offer for you! If you agree to sign up for the Anarchist Credit Card (ACC), and agree to use it for at least 80% of your consumer purchases, we will deposit $700,000 into your ACC account every single year, free of charge, for you to spend as you see fit!

We will also only charge you 1% interest per year…

Would that be an offer that just might interest you? $700,000 of free money every single year, just for signing up for and using particular credit card?

Well, this is exactly the anarchist offer!

Given the massive incentives involved in participating in a voluntary monetary system, we can be certain that all but the insane will leap at the opportunity.

Entrepreneurs who can offer people an immediate and permanent 20-fold increase in their income will not find any shortage of people willing to sign up for their services.

Thus, we can be absolutely and completely sure that a stateless society will have a stable and beneficial monetary system.

We can now spend some time examining how it might work.

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

It is always fascinating to see what Ayn Rand used to call the “blank out,” which occurs when people defend the existing statist system of currency.

Government predation upon the economy through its monopoly on currency is one of the most savage and destructive aspects of a statist society.

The overprinting of money, which is used to bribe existing special interests, results in inflation, or the loss of purchasing power that results from too many dollars chasing too few goods and services.

If I wanted to start a credit card company, and sent out a business plan to investors informing them that my goal was to ensure that consumers paid 5% more per year for all their purchases, and use that as the basis for my profit, they would laugh at me as insane and ridiculous! “Who would sign up for such a vampiric credit card?” they would chortle, and probably send it around to each other as a joke.

Then, these very same investors will run across an anarchist, and end up defending the existing statist currency system, without even noticing the rank contradiction.

This is the true strangeness of the world that only the anarchist can see.

Inflation is a brutal attack upon the poor; deficit financing is also a staggering predation upon the unborn, the financial equivalent of a farmer securing a loan by pledging his unborn future livestock.

The reason that statist monetary systems always grow to collapse is the simple financial equation that lies at their root.

The reason that Mafia protection schemes “work” is because the costs of enforcement are far less than the rewards of intimidation. If you ask a restaurant owner for $1,000 a month in “protection,” but it only costs you $100 a month to pay a thug to threaten him, the economic benefit is clear. In effect, the thug’s wages are directly paid for by his victims, and the vast profits go to the thug’s leaders.

The limitation in the profits of organized crime is the balance of power between the thugs and the restaurant owners. If the Mafia predation becomes too great, the owners will simply sell their restaurants and set up shop elsewhere. Alternatively, they can hire their own security guards to protect their restaurants, thus starving the Mafia out of business – or hire their own thugs to threaten the Mafia thugs in return. (In “The Godfather,” for instance, a young Corleone decided to kill a thug rather than pay him.)

However, governments are subject to no such “restrictions.” Moving out of Brooklyn is one thing; moving out of the United States is quite another, due to the time and expense involved. Furthermore, moving to another country does not solve the problem of taxation, because “protection money” will be violently extracted from you no matter where you end up living.

Furthermore, citizens cannot hire security guards to protect them against the police and the military, since they are so outgunned. Thus the limitations of evasion or retaliation simply do not exist in a statist society.

In addition, governments become less and less reliant on direct and immediate taxation over time, since their ability to print money and take out loans against future taxation diminishes the need to please the taxpayer in the short run.

Thus we can see that the Mafia would only continue to grow if they could somehow establish the following situations:

1. The restaurant owners could never leave.
2. The restaurant owners could never defend themselves.
3. The Mafia could take out legal loans against future “protection” profits.
4. The Mafia could print as much money as it wanted – whenever it wanted – and would never face any significant “counterfeit” competition.
5. The Mafia was well-paid to collect this protection money.

This situation would result in a cancerous growth in the size and power of the Mafia, because the significant imbalance between short-term gains and long-term pains would be so great that the deferral of immediate profits would never occur. We may as well expect a single and childless young man who knows that he has only two weeks to live to spend one of those weeks planning and investing in his retirement.

Of course, it is entirely natural and inevitable that the government defines its own actions as virtuous, and the exact same actions as evil and criminal if performed by others. Printing money is an essential and virtuous government function; the private printing of money is the evil act of “counterfeiting” – although both are the creation of fiat currency out of thin air for the private profiteering of particular individuals.

If you’re in the mood for a bit of intellectual fun, it is always enjoyable to try out the following approach when arguing for an anarchist society: describe how you think an anarchist society should run, but smuggle statist principles in, just to see if people notice the substitution.

In the case of currency, I would say something like this:

“The way that I see currency working in a stateless society is that one particular private agency should have the right to print as much money as it wants, whenever it wants – and it should use this power to pay for an army that it would then use to shoot anyone who tried printing competing currencies. This agency should have the right to create debts for people who have not even been born yet, and to charge whatever it wants to the citizenry as a whole, using the future income that will steal from them as collateral for spending in the here and now!”

Naturally, people are shocked and appalled when I propose such a system. They consider it corrupt and evil for money to be created and promulgated in this manner, and immediately respond with myriad examples of the endless and immoral consequences of my proposed system.

Then, they inevitably defend the Federal Reserve…

The “shock treatment” of this sudden reversal has at least the potential to jolt someone’s conscience into a kind of desperately-needed rationality, and help them finally see the savage amount of propaganda that has been inflicted on them.

Monetary Aspects of Stateless Money

It is impossible to know for certain how money will work in a stateless society, but I can at least tell you what I would prefer as a consumer.

Stability

One of the greatest – and unnecessary – challenges in existing statist societies is a near-complete inability to know what the future holds in terms of monetary stability. The interest rate goes up and down according to the whims of the leaders; more money is printed, and then less money is printed; the government scoops up more, then less, of available capital in terms of loans; bonds are issued with a variety of interest rates, and so on.

In particular industries, the business environment is even more random. Regulations swell and change; tariffs rise and alter; import restrictions grow and fall; union rules come and go – and the endless teasing possibility of government subsidies and contracts keeps many a faltering business around long after its natural expiry date.

Thus, the first guarantee that I would require from anyone wishing to enroll me in a monetary system would be stability. I do not want to have to worry about whether my money will be worth less next year, or whether its value is going to fluctuate in any substantial manner.

Portability

There is a reason that people tend to travel with credit cards, rather than with gift certificates for specific stores and restaurants. Since gift certificates are not as portable, they would have to carry a significant stack of them to spend money from place to place.

When traveling abroad, credit cards are generally preferable to cash, because they do not have to be converted, and are less convenient to steal.

In the same way, gold has been a common currency throughout history because it is rare, portable, strong enough to last (but soft enough to mould), universally valued, easily dividable, and does not lose value when it is split, like a diamond.

Thus, to get my business, any particular currency would have to offer portability.

The cost savings for monetary systems tend to take the form of a bell curve – when a currency is not very portable, like a gift certificate, it remains very cheap to produce and consume. When a currency becomes somewhat portable, it operates in a kind of limbo – it is much more expensive than a gift certificate, but not as cheap as a currency that is very portable, which has economies of scale working for it.

For instance, it might be valuable for the retailers in my geographical region to offer me a form of subsidized currency that I could only spend in their stores. This already occurs in used-books stores; you can either take cash or credit – and the credit is much more lucrative, because the store owner gains the additional value of knowing that you will buy only from him.

However, localized currencies face the significant disadvantage of being unusable in transactions that require wider economic reach. It is unlikely that the company that provides your electricity resides in your county, in which case your “local dollars” could not be used to pay your electricity bill, which would cost you additional time and energy to pay the bill from a different account, using a more universal currency.

In a stateless society, your bank could also analyze your spending habits and proactively buy particular currencies. If you spend $100 a month at Store X, it could buy 100 “Store X dollars” a month, getting a 5% discount, since Store X can book its unspent consumer dollars as an asset and guarantee of future earnings. The bank may charge you 1% for this service, but you would still be 4% ahead.

We must remember that inconvenience breeds entrepreneurs. In a stateless society, an obvious service would be a “transparent” way of paying your bills using the most advantageous currency available. I might have bank accounts with five different kinds of currency – and thus my bank would provide bill payments in a universal format; I would not need to know all the details, but the bank would complete my transaction using the most advantageous currency. In this way, I might have different kinds of money, but that difference would be largely invisible to me, except for the savings I would receive. (Note that these different currencies would also be a disincentive for invasion, as mentioned above.)

Would it be cheaper for me to participate in a currency that would be accepted on the other side of the world? That is very hard to predict ahead of time, because there would be significant cost savings in a universal currency, but there would be significant costs as well. It is hard to imagine that a Chinese food seller would be interested in offering currency-based discounts to a teenager in Zimbabwe, and so the local incentive to provide subsidized currency would be diminished. On the other hand, the significant amount of technical resources required to run any currency would not have to be duplicated.

Of course, since inconvenience breeds entrepreneurs, it is certain that a number of enterprising souls would come up with a framework for running currencies that could be populated with any number of specific currencies, just as websites almost never write their own “shopping cart” code from scratch, but rather populate existing frameworks with their own products and prices.

This approach could very easily overcome the problem of duplicate investments in technical currency frameworks – this, combined with a transparent abstraction layer for bill-paying in multiple currencies, would create an enormously efficient and user-friendly currency system – or systems, to be more precise.

Security

If the above two criteria were met, my next consumer question would be: how secure is this currency?

Security is always a delicate balance between usability and safety. Any online transaction could require you to enter 10 unique passwords, each 255 characters long, which would then be virtually unbreakable – the problem is that no one would use it, for the same reason that very few people put 20 locks on their front door, and walk around like some sort of apartment superintendent, their key rings clanking like a suit of chain mail. It certainly is an inconvenience to be robbed, but it is also inconvenient to spend 20 minutes opening and locking your door every day.

I would not require that my currency be perfectly secure (if this were even possible) – I would prefer that this security at least match my preferences and requirements.

Some people are carefree; some people are cautious, and some people are downright paranoid. The paranoid people always prefer to shift the costs of securing their money to the carefree people; in the same way, the carefree people resent paying for all the extra security features that the paranoid prefer. Thus, any effective supplier of a monetary system would very likely have different levels of security and precautions, and would charge the appropriate costs for each level.

Carefree people might choose to have few if any security features at all, and thus pay the least for participating in a monetary system. On the other hand, the paranoid might require voice and fingerprint identification, as well as retina scans, specific dance moves and obscure Urdu phrases in order to complete a transaction. All this specialization is part and parcel of the inevitable entrepreneurial obsession with providing the most possible value in every conceivable situation, in order to avoid leaving even one thin dime of potential profit on the table.

Of course, a central purpose of the free market is not to create profit, but rather to eliminate it, or at least make it as small as possible. Any firm which overcharges will inevitably be undercut, which is why profits even in successful companies are generally no more than a few percentage points. Thus we can be sure that there will be just the right number of currency systems in a free society – not so many that economic interactions become complicated and cumbersome, but not so few that a lack of competition will allow profits to inflate.

The majority of economic transactions in a free society will be performed electronically, because the transaction costs are far lower – however, cash will always be necessary, for a variety of reasons. The price of cash transactions, being higher, will be reflected in a lack of discounts – or a surcharge – in the price, which will discourage but not eliminate these kinds of interactions. It also seems likely that cash will not carry a guarantee of restitution in the case of loss or theft, in the way that electronic currency would, unless there was a way to electronically associate cash with a particular individual.

At the moment, it may seem that electronic transactions are subjected to a surcharge, while cash transactions are not – however, this is not the case at all.

Credit card companies do charge a few percentage points per transaction, while cash can get you certain kinds of discounts at computer stores, but in reality the exact reverse is true.

Currently, if you take your money and put it under a mattress, it will lose a few percentage points at least per year due to inflation. Furthermore, a certain percentage of your taxes is used to maintain and defend the statist monopoly on currency. It is quite likely – if we include debts and deficits – that you are paying at least 10% of your income for the “privilege” of participating in a statist currency system. This system has all the characteristics of any brutal and violent monopoly, which is that it is exploitive, random, destructive, cancerous, and on a certain course toward annihilation.

I pay a percentage point or two on most of the donations I receive for Freedomain, which come through PayPal. I assume that in a free market, this would be halved at least – thus I think it is safe to say that currency transactions would be very likely around 1% of the total value, or one tenth of the bare minimum of what you’re paying at the moment for the statist system.

A 90% reduction in cost, combined with far greater security features, guaranteed stability in the value of the currency, portability proportional to your requirement – as well as discount incentives to shop in particular areas – would result in an essentially “free” monetary system. (It would also doubtless be the case that you could choose not to pay a penny in fees to use a currency, if you were willing to submit to advertisements on that currency!)

Bankruptcy?

What would happen, though, if a particular currency DRO ended up going bankrupt? Would everyone end up losing his or her life savings?

The standard cliché here – at least for older people – is the “bank run” scene in Depression-era movies, where frantic people storm a bank desperate to get their money, once they hear that it might be going out of business.

Of course, this vision is always considered to be negative towards banks, rather than towards the relatively new Federal Reserve, which was in charge of the currency for the entire nation. In the same way, if a foreign enemy were to bomb farm fields in the Midwest, it is doubtless the greedy capitalist grocery store owners who would be blamed and vilified in perpetuity for the resulting price increases.

Let us say that some greedy or improvident DRO currency provider started running his company poorly – what would happen?

Well, the first thing that would happen is that his investors and board of directors would notice.

The first thing that I would require from the group in charge of any currency system I was involved in would be that they hold the majority of their savings in the currency system that they are trying to sell to me. I would demand external audits to ensure that at least 80% of their savings were in their own currency system. The moment that any of these people began to sell off their own currency holdings, it would be a clear indication that they no longer had faith in the long-term viability of what they were selling.

Secondly, I would require an immediate sale of the company should its asset/debt ratio exceed a very conservative number. How would a sale help me? Well, if someone wanted to buy a distressed currency company, he or she would only want to do so if the existing customer base could be retained. In other words, additional benefits would have to be offered to the customers in order to retain them – a fee holiday, some sort of cash bonus or something like that. In order to keep me from withdrawing my money from this currency system, someone would have to pay me to accept the increased risk if it was in distress.

Thirdly, I would demand that any significant losses come directly out of the bank accounts and assets of those in charge of the currency. If I ended up only being paid 80 cents on the dollar, because they had screwed up the business, I would make damn sure that they ended up with zero cents on the dollar, and living in a van down by the river as well!

This would eliminate the incentive for managers to prey upon the company for personal gain. No matter how badly their customers ended up, they would end up in a far worse situation.

Fourthly, I would demand the right to withdraw all of my money at any time I wanted.

Let us now trace the likely sequence of events that would occur if a currency company got into financial trouble.

As mentioned above, the leadership and investors would be very quickly aware of any potential problem, and would be equally if not painfully aware that if a whiff of scandal or instability leaked into the marketplace, their entire investment may very well go down the drain.

Since voluntarism and a free society is all about preventing problems, rather than curing them – the direct opposite of statism, which is all about inventing problems, and then exacerbating them – managers and investors would be hyper-vigilant in protecting the financial soundness of their organization. The success of any voluntary money system starts and ends with credibility and trust – the moment that either becomes even remotely compromised, the entire system is called into question. Competitors will always be looking for weaknesses in other monetary systems, and will provide incentives to lure customers away. Thus the investors and managers would put every conceivable check and balance in place to ensure that the system remained trustworthy.

Should some upcoming problem escape them, however, and Company XYZ were to encounter real financial difficulties, what would happen?

Well, when any company hits a financial problem, it is either because it is no longer viable, or it is being badly run. Since we have already established the innate value of and requirement for currency, we know that XYZ cannot be in trouble because no one needs its services anymore – thus its difficulties must result from being badly run.

If a company is being badly run, it can either reform itself from within, or it cannot.

If XYZ can reform its management practices from within, then bankruptcy will not be the result of its misstep – some firings, some dropped bonuses, and some cutbacks, but not bankruptcy. Customers might not even have a clear sense that anything is amiss at all.

Ah, but what happens if XYZ cannot reform itself from within?

In any free market system, there exists a plethora of so-called “raiders” who are constantly looking for poorly-run companies to snap up and improve. These raiders would doubtless very quickly sniff out the problems within the company, and would try to take it over in some manner.

If I were one of these raiders, I would face a very difficult balancing act, which is that it would be advantageous for me to leak the problems XYZ was experiencing, in order to drive down the value of the company and pick it up for less money – however, such a leak would also create a panic among the customers, which could largely eliminate the value of the company.

Thus, my best strategy would be to leak the problems at XYZ – and simultaneously offer a guarantee to existing customers that their currency would be protected, as well as some sort of incentive or bonus to retain their allegiance. I would be willing to put all of this in writing, of course, in a binding contract, which would take effect the moment I got control of the company.

This would cause a temporary dip in the price of XYZ, thus allowing me to gain control of it more cheaply – and would at least help alleviate the fears of existing customers by providing a binding guarantee to retain the value of their money.

However, as a raider, I would be facing significant competition from another source – other currency companies.

Company ABC, on hearing about any possible problems with XYZ, would immediately take out full-page advertisements, offering significant bonuses to any XYZ customers who transferred their money to the ABC Company. There would be so many “lifeboat” companies offering to rescue XYZ customers at par or greater that such customers would doubtless be able to walk to shore!

It could be the case that whatever solution any individual customer chooses might not pan out – in other words, a raider might offer a five percent bonus to currency holdings, and then fail to deliver it, falter in his execution, and customers might end up having to pull out at eighty or ninety cents on the dollar.

Color me cold, but I cannot see the innate tragedy in such a situation. Anyone who offers you “free” money does so with the implicit – though perhaps unspoken – background of risk. If I decide to leave my money in a troubled company, in the hopes of gaining five percent more, and I end up getting ten percent less, it is hard to see how that is significantly different from investing in a stock or a bond – or a horse, for that matter.

Thus, there is no conceivable situation in which currency customers would wake up one day to find their savings utterly wiped out – there is so much profit in customer retention, particularly in currency situations, that a literal stampede of entrepreneurs would attempt to insert themselves into the equation, to the benefit of the existing customers.

 Compared to What?

Doubtless there are ten thousand churning minds out there at this very moment, chanting their heated way through every conceivable possibility that might result in financial ruin for customers of the XYZ Currency Company. And perhaps such a possibility exists – but again, this is an argument for anarchism, not against it.

Any farmer can fail to produce crops at any particular time – this is a natural reality and risk of farming, or indeed of any human endeavor.

Since any farmer can fail to produce crops, the only way that we can guarantee – as best as possible – the continual supply of crops is to have a large number of farmers. If we only have one farmer for the entire world – to take an exaggerated example – then the moment that the inevitable happens, and that farmer fails to produce crops, worldwide starvation inevitably results.

This distribution of risk is an essential part of any rational strategy to reduce danger. If you are only ever allowed to buy one stock your whole life long, then you may do very well, but you also may do very badly. Diversification is the key to minimizing risk.

In the same way, when we have a State monopoly on currency, and we accept that currency organizations can fail from time to time – and certainly there is no shortage in history of examples of States corrupting and destroying their currencies – we have truly all of our eggs in one very precarious basket.

If we are truly concerned about currency failure in a free market system, then the worst possible solution we could come up with would be to create a violent monopoly over a single currency. If we are concerned about farm failures, then obviously the solution is to have as many farms as economically possible, so that those that fail can be shored up by those that succeed.

In other words, if currency failure is not a problem, then a stateless society is the best solution.

If currency failure is a problem – then a stateless society is the best solution.

Saving Children: The Stateless Society and the Protection of the Helpless

All moralists interested in improving society must answer the most essential questions about human motivation, and show how their proposed solutions will create a rational framework of incentives, punishments and rewards that further moral goals generally accepted as good. The 20th century clearly showed that there is no possibility for ideology to invent or create an “ideal man” – and that all such attempts generally create a hell on earth. Utopian thinkers must work with man as he is, and recognize the inevitability of self-interest and the positive responses to incentives that characterize the human soul.

In the previous chapters on the stateless society, I have shown how society can operate in the absence of a centralized government. One question that repeatedly arises in response to these possibilities has been the following:

In the absence of a centralized State-run police force and law/court system, how can child abuse be prevented, or at least minimized?

When discussing ethical issues, it is essential to deal with what is arguably the greatest evil within human society: the abuse of children by their parents or primary caregivers. If we can create a society that treats children better than they are currently treated, we have created a goal or a destination worthy of the considerable efforts it will take to achieve it.

In any post-tribal society, family life generally becomes very opaque. Great evils can be committed within the family home, in isolation from the general view of society, and children by their very nature can do almost nothing to protect themselves. Excepting grave or obvious physical injuries, governmental agencies rarely get involved – and even when such agencies do get involved, it is far from clear that their involvement results in a better situation for the victimized child.

As we know from totalitarian regimes, any situation which combines an extreme disparity in authority with a lack of accountability for those in power tends to increase abuse. This does not mean that all parents are abusive, of course, but it does mean that in situations where abusive tendencies do exist, the power differential between parents and children, combined with the reality that few parents face any legal or direct financial consequences for their abuse, tends to prolong and exacerbate child maltreatment.

Due to this situation, it is hard to say that the existing system works to maximize the protection and security of children. While there is no perfect utopia wherein all children will be loved, nurtured and protected, any society which contains strong positive incentives for good parenting is a vast improvement over the current situation. Since children are by far the most vulnerable members of society, if a stateless society can protect them better than a statist society, it is perhaps the greatest moral benefit that anarchism can bring to bear on the human condition.

Before discussing how a stateless society can far better protect children, let us first look at how existing societies create problems for children.

• The existence of the welfare state has directly contributed to the rise of single-parent families. Abuse is generally more prevalent in single-parent families.
• The war on drugs has created extremely unstable, volatile and violent social circumstances.
• Government-run housing projects have gathered together unstable single mothers and unstable drug dealers (in fact, housing projects are sometimes called “girlfriend farms” for such men) – thus exposing children to highly dysfunctional role models.
• Public school education often creates unstable and dangerous environments for children, where younger children in particular are easy prey for bullies.
• The rise of taxation has reduced take-home income to the point where, for many families, both parents need to work. This has left children vulnerable to abuse by outside caregivers – and often leads to an excess of unsupervised time for children in their early teens.
• Government-run social agencies are no better at protecting children than any other State agencies are at protecting the environment, helping the poor, healing the sick, or any of the other self-appointed “missions” that bureaucrats devise for themselves.
• If a badly-raised child becomes a criminal, parents are not directly liable for the resulting social, medical, legal or property costs.
• If, through their bad parenting, parents end up alienating their children, they face far fewer financial problems in their old age, due to State-run social security benefits.

It is clear, then, that the existing system has room for improvement, let us say. How, then, does a stateless society better encourage good parenting?

First of all, in a stateless society, disputes between people are mediated by DROs. Is there any way that DROs can profitably intervene in a situation where there are deteriorating relationships between parent and child, or where the child is being directly harmed?

One of the primary reasons for the existence of DROs is to protect citizens against unacceptable levels of risk. In a free society, if a child goes off the rails and begins hurting other people or damaging their property, DROs will hold the parents responsible. To take a true disaster scenario, if your child paralyzes another child, you as a parent will be on the hook for a lifetime of medical bills, rehabilitation and equipment. Given that childhood – even in the absence of malice – is a physically risky time, few parents would accept the risk of having no protection for any potential injuries their child might commit or experience.

Like any insurance company, DROs would lower rates for children who were less at risk. An insurance company would prefer that your child be active – or they would face the health problems which naturally arise from inactivity – but not that your child be aggressive, especially towards other children. Children who learned positive negotiation skills – or at least did not hit, throw, punch or push other children – would be cheaper to insure. Parents who raised aggressive children would be charged far more in insurance than those who raise more peaceful offspring.

Some forms of child abuse do not generally result in destructive tendencies towards others, but rather towards the self. Anorexia nervosa, self-mutilation, excessive piercings and hyper-dangerous activities are all signs that a child has experienced specific forms of abuse – usually sexual in nature. Given that DROs also provide health insurance, it seems likely that DROs would do as much as possible to prevent and detect these kinds of activities, since they scarcely profit from self-destructive behavior.

At this point, you may be thinking that bad parents would scarcely stay in a DRO system, since it would be very expensive to insure their children. This is a natural response, but incorrect.

For instance, most parents prefer to have their children educated – even parents who abuse their children. Most schools would doubtless prefer DRO coverage for their students, because “unprotected” children would be more risky to have around. Thus, in order to get their children educated, parents have to have a DRO contract that protects them. If you are a bad parent, it will be almost impossible to avoid the significant costs imposed upon you.

Furthermore, I would prefer that my DRO refuse to insure parents without also insuring their children, because I care deeply about the health and well-being of children.

I am sure that I am not alone in this desire.

Proactive Protection

Currently, when you apply for medical insurance in the United States, you are subjected to a battery of tests aimed at determining your general level of health, and so your future medical risks. Similarly, life insurance costs usually depend on health indicators such as smoking, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Also, the earlier that you buy insurance, the lower your initial payments are.

Thus, we can imagine that a variety of DROs will approach new parents with a number of different insurance offers, all designed to protect their children.

These DROs will be eager to offer the lowest possible rates for the parents. How can they achieve that? When a young man applies for his first car insurance, the insurance company usually takes into account any driving courses that he has taken. Similarly, DROs will offer lower rates to parents who take specific training on how to best raise children to be peaceful, safe and healthy members of society. DROs will also work hard to determine exactly which parenting practices are most likely to produce such happy children.

Children need very specific guidelines and parenting skills at different stages in their development. Given that parents are likely to want to keep insurance coverage on their children until they turn 18 – and that DROs are very interested in preventing problems over the long run – it also seems likely that DROs will continue to provide lower-cost coverage if parents update their parenting skills periodically.

There are other significant indicators that parenting is becoming problematic. For instance, parental substance abuse virtually guarantees that the children will be abused or neglected. DROs will offer far lower rates to parents who have either never shown these tendencies, or if they have, are willing to subject themselves to rehabilitation and random testing to prove that they are still clean. Remember that these tests are in no way intrusive in nature – parents can always refuse to take such tests, and simply accept the consequences.

What about the children? Since prevention is by far the better part of cure, their insurance costs will remain the lowest if potential problems can be identified before they manifest themselves in costly antisocial behavior. With the young in particular, early intervention is the key. How can DROs best keep the costs low for these children? Intermittent psychological and behavioural assessments would be a good start, as would proactive parenting classes. Naturally, no parents would ever be required to submit their children for assessment – they would just pay for the increased costs if they did not.

If a child displayed truly problematic behavior, DROs would threaten to drop family coverage entirely unless the parents accepted intervention.

This combination of research, financial incentives and constant updating creates three partners in the raising of children – parents who wish to keep their children happy and their insurance costs as low as possible, DROs who wish to prevent problems rather than pay for their remediation, and experts who constantly research and communicate best practices in parenting.

Parents who were themselves poorly raised often do not understand the best way to raise their own children. Lacking access to objective information and best practices, they often repeat the same mistakes that were inflicted upon them. Parents currently reluctant to “lift the blinds” on their parenting and familial circumstances would be presented with strong and positive financial incentives to do so. Parents who refused any kind of DRO coverage for their children – or who refused reasonable interventions to help them improve their parenting – would face negative repercussions from the DRO system, which have been discussed at length above. Thus it seems highly likely that a stateless society would create a wide variety of social interests all focused on improving the parenting of children, and ensuring the children were raised to be as peaceful, happy and productive as possible.

A Parenting Fable

There is an old fable that goes something like this: the Sun and the Wind are having an argument as to which one of them is stronger. The Wind boasts that he is able to uproot trees, tear the roofs off houses and throw down power lines. The Sun looks sceptical. Below them, as they argue, a man is walking along a country road. “Ah”, says the Wind, “I bet I can tear the cloak right off this man’s back!” “Go ahead,” smiles the Sun. The Wind goes down and tears around this man, attempting to pry his cloak off his back. Naturally, the man simply clutches his cloak tighter, and the Wind can find no purchase. Finally, exhausted, the Wind withdraws. “Let me show you how it’s done,” says the Sun. Bursting into full brilliance, the Sun generates enormous heat, and the man begins to sweat. After ten minutes or so, the man sighs, wipes his brow – and slowly shrugs off his cloak.

This parable contains a powerful message about the difference between a stateless society, and society ruled by centralized government. The government always tries to force people to do things, which only increases their resistance and secrecy with regard to State power. Human society, though, only advances when a multiplicity of competing voluntary agencies create and maintain circumstances which truly benefit virtue and punish vice. This is an apt description of the free market – and it is also a description of the manner in which a stateless society will continually work to improve the safety and happiness of children.

Preventing Tragedy – An Anarchic Analysis of Abortion

Abortion is alwaysa tragedy, and one of the saddest occurrences on this earth. Government “solutions” are also always disastrous, and so it is hard to understand how combining a tragedy with a disaster can create any kind of positive outcome. Mixing arsenic with mercury does not solve the problem of poison – and combining the violent inefficiency of the State with the tragedy of abortion does not solve the problem of family planning.

All those wishing to reduce the incidence of abortion – surely all rational and sensitive souls – must recognize that giving the government the power to combat abortion also gives it the power to promote abortion, which it currently does to a hideous degree. The best way to reduce the incidence of abortion is to withdraw State subsidies and allow the economic and social consequences to accrue to those who engage in sexually risky behaviours.

Reducing the incidence of abortion is not very complicated, since it is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any other human activity. Simply put, any activity that is subsidized will increase, and any activity that is taxed will decrease. The incidence of abortion will go down only when abortion is no longer subsidized – and when responsible family planning is no longer taxed.

Abortion is very rare in a stable marriage, and is generally only performed under an extremity of financial or medical distress. The vast majority of abortions occur to single women, or women in unstable relationships. Particularly over the past fifty-odd years, the role of sexuality has been forcibly separated from marriage and procreation. This is an entirely predictable – although perfectly horrible – development, given the role of the State in breaking down stable family structures.

Subsidizing Abortion

In general, any program which subsidizes pregnancy in the absence of a stable family structure will also tend to encourage abortion. In particular, State subsidies which encourage the pursuit of sexual pleasure in the absence of virtue, financial stability (or at least opportunity) and personal responsibility will also tend to increase the number of abortions. When the financial and social consequences of pregnancy are mitigated through State programs, risky sexual behaviours will inevitably increase – resulting in an increase of both pregnancies and abortions.

Controlling or mitigating the financial consequences of unwanted pregnancies directly alters the kinds of decisions that women make about sexual practices and partners. Having a child out of wedlock is one of the most costly decisions a woman can make, insofar as it tends to significantly arrest her educational, emotional and career development. The physical impossibility of being able to work for money and care for an infant at the same time reduces most young single mothers to a life of dependency, exhaustion and poverty. The chance of meeting a good man when already burdened with a baby lowers a single mother’s chances for a good marriage. Not only does she come with a baby and significant expenses, but she probably also has few economic skills to offer. Plus, it is hard to date when you are breastfeeding. For these and many other reasons, single mothers often end up settling for unstable, unreliable men, just to have any sort of man around. Inevitably, the chances of having another baby thus increase – sadly, without a corresponding increase in relational stability.

This is why, in the past, society expended considerable effort to ensure that women did not get pregnant before marriage. The staggering financial losses incurred by childbirth without commitment usually accrued to the new grandparents, and so it was those parents who tried to do their best to prevent such a disaster. This need, being common to all parents, was generally shared across society, creating a near-impenetrable web of sexual chaperoning. (Social self-government based on individual incentives is the only way that social problems have been – or ever will be – solved to any degree of stability.)

It currently costs about $250,000 to bring a child from birth to age 18, under the current system. In a free market environment, with fully privatized and charity-supported education, health care, housing and so on, this cost will decrease of course (since all taxation would cease, and competition increase) – but it would still be considerable.

Babies, in short, are expensive. However, when the welfare state enters the equation, all of the above changes. Now, if a young woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, she can survive quite nicely. She will very likely never be rich – or probably even middle class – but she will be able to survive on some combination of any of the hundreds of State subsidies which directly benefit poor mothers.

In addition to the usual suspects – welfare, Medicare, child supplements, food stamps – there are many other ways she can lean on the State. When her child grows up, the State will also pay for his or her education. Does she need to take the bus? That is subsidized as well. Drop her child off for a story at the library? Subsidized. Daycare is subsidized as well, as is her apartment through rent control or public housing. Dental problems? No problem – subsidies take care of most if not all of the bills. The amount of money and resources provided to single mothers by the State is literally staggering! And when she gets old? Not to worry if she has been unable to save much money, or has alienated her children – Social Security will take care of her!

Since getting pregnant while unmarried is no longer a “life or death” issue, a young woman has far less incentive to keep her womb to herself until the right man comes along. She will not have a great life economically, but she will survive just fine – and also nicely avoid having to slave away at low-rent jobs. If you were staring at years of McJobs before you got any kind of decent career, “Plan B for Baby” might start looking pretty attractive, too!

Through such State-enforced subsidies, young women are seduced into self-destructive decisions, and sink into an underworld of dependent and dangerous lifestyles. If they have daughters, those girls will grow up in a world filled with unstable men, and without a loyal father’s love and guidance. What are the odds of such girls growing up to be sexually responsible? Not nil, certainly, but not high either.

As a result of the increasing subsidization of poor sexual choices, the stage is set for rising numbers of abortions – and, since having an unnecessary abortion is one of the most egregious examples of preferring short-term gains to long-term gains, subsidizing error is scarcely the best method of encouraging greater rationality.

Taxing Family Planning

It is very hard to make good decisions when everyone around you is making bad decisions. Either you go along, and jump right into their pit of error, or you withdraw, provoking social ostracism and, all too often, outright hostility. When, encouraged by the endless subsidies of State programs, a certain number of unplanned pregnancies are reached, they become the norm, and vaguely something “not to be criticized.” Young women, in order to keep their friends and not be attacked as “superior,” often decide that it is cool to engage in sexually risky activities. When combined with the financial incentives outlined above, the “social acceptance” motive proves overwhelming for far too many women.

What alternatives are available to those young women who decide to take the “straight and narrow” course and avoid risky behaviours? What kind of opportunities are out there? Minimum wages, State-monopoly unions, over-regulation, crippling taxation, mind-numbing apprenticeship programs and a thousand other political factors have virtually killed off good job opportunities for the poor and unskilled. Jobs are scarce, taxes are high, and careers almost impossible. State schools fail to train poor youngsters for anything useful, and higher education is probably out of the picture as well. So it is fairly safe to say that productive and honorable lifestyles are as thwarted as irresponsibility and instant gratification are encouraged.

The Men

So far we have only been talking about women – but what about the men? How has male behaviour been affected by these fundamental reversals in social values? Well, as the negative effects of sexual indiscretion become smaller and smaller, men also become conditioned to expect, let us say, “short term” interactions with the fairer sex. As more and more women decide to engage in risky sex without requiring a commitment, the value of education, integrity and hard work for men goes down proportionally. As male virtue becomes debased, other values, more sinister and shallow, take their place. Women go for “hot” guys, or guys with lots of cash to spend, or with the kind of predatory status that comes with gang membership. The entire ecosystem of sexual attraction and stable provision is turned upside down, and the men formerly viewed as losers become winners – and vice versa.

Thus, a woman looking for a “good” man faces a distinct scarcity of such paragons – and may also face the mockery of her peers if she chooses a geeky provider over a shifty stud-muffin. “Good men” become more scarce – and objects of ridicule to boot. Female attractiveness, formerly the coin that purchased male loyalty, now becomes a magnet for shallow and unstable man-boys looking for another notch in their belts.

Problems such as abortion are so complex that they cannot be solved without reference to the shifting nature of rewards and punishments created by an ever-growing and ever-violent State. Like most social problems, the solution must be voluntary, and based on the financial, social and moral realities of biology and economics.

Part 4: Conclusions

The Value of Anarchism

I am often asked why on earth anyone should get interested in anarchism, when there is virtually no chance that a stateless society will ever come into existence in our lifetime, or in the foreseeable future at all.

This is a very interesting question, and to some degree it involves a very personal answer, and so I hope you will forgive me if I forego the odd syllogism or two, and speak directly from the heart.

The Future

The story of the progress of human morals is almost entirely populated by people who did not live to see the world that they loved in their minds. Those to whom the idea of the separation of church and state arose as a tiny, faint glimmer over the burning horizon of religious warfare did not live to see these two whores pried apart by the power of philosophy.

Those who first dreamed of a world free of slavery lived only to see slavery increase and worsen, not diminish and collapse.

Those who dreamed of reason, evidence and science in the late Middle Ages saw their dreams go up in endless flames – and, all too often, themselves as well, under the burning mercies of Christian “salvation.”

Those who dream of peaceful debate rather than flashing swords taste the bitter dregs of hemlock, not the sweet nectar of victory.

It is an inevitable consequence of inertia and corruption that those who dream of a better world almost always die before those dreams come true. The entrenched and pompous self-righteousness of viciousness and exploitation always moves to discredit any attack with all the resources it has stolen. The embedded corruptions of existing familial, professional, economic and political relationships is a sinewy Hydra that a thousand men with a thousand swords cannot possibly bring down in one generation.

However, you may say, even if this is true, what form of altruistic madness could take hold of us to the point where we are willing to sacrifice so many comforts in this world in order to secure a better one for people we shall never meet? Why should I care for people who are living 200 years from now, and their opinion of me, and those who fight beside me in a war whose spoils only the unborn will receive? Even if they thank us, and build statues in our names, what possible good can that do for us now? Why should we give up all the creature comforts of blind conformity and refuse to surrender to the endless momentum of the cultural riptide, gaining no love and peace in the present, but rather only willed incomprehension and spiteful calumny?

There may be those among us who are motivated for the most part by a love for a future that they shall never inhabit. There may be those of us willing to sit in the dark and tell tales of green fields to our fellow dungeon-dwellers, so that our grandchildren’s children, whose lineage has been sustained by the bright stories of a free world beyond their walls, can emerge from the rubble of their crumbling jails into a sunlight that has been pictured and predicted, though not seen, for many decades.

And it will be our world, this world of the future, that we shall never tread. The evils and pettiness of the world that is will fall away from our rising ideals, like unneeded past boosters from a rocket piercing the stratosphere and launching to the stars. The door to this world of beauty, and plenty, and generosity, and peace, and benevolence can only be opened by the key of philosophy, of wisdom. I personally consider it the greatest possible honor to do my part in helping to fashion this golden key. I am a kind of intransigent warrior, far more at home in this time of war, the war for the future, than I would be I think in this world of the future, where all major foes and evils have been laid to rest. A natural warrior can rejoice to be born in a time of war – I am just such a born fighter, and take enormous pride and satisfaction in confronting and attempting to master the embedded evils and lies of the human mind. The size of my soul, it has turned out, is directly proportional to the size of my enemies, the enemies of wisdom and virtue. In this time, where the exploration of this world has largely ceased, but the exploration of other worlds has yet to begin, my restless, combative and explorative nature finds its true natural home and greatest possible purpose in the mental wrestling with unseen demons.

Thus, I can genuinely say that I could not conceivably wish to be born or to live in any other time. This new universe of instantaneous communication is my natural element, and the endless potential of these unexplored lands of thoughts, feelings, dreams and insights has given my soul scope to expand in a way that I never imagined possible. I am hopefully slightly larger than the size of my enemies; and certainly far smaller than the scope of the world I explore.

For me, then, the small pleasures of social conformity shrink to insignificance next to the glory of leading the charge in this kind of battle, the thrill of reasoning out new connections, the excitement of lighting up my own mind, and helping to light up the minds of others. To feel the power of significant evolution within the span of a few years, within my own mind, within my own soul, within my own life, is for me a staggering and unprecedented gift, which I would live a thousand years of social discomfort in order to attain.

I am also acutely aware of the reality that had I been born and lived in a different time – a later time, or an earlier one – I would have been pedaling a bicycle with a broken chain, if you understand me. The power of the conversation that I have initiated and am involved in is what gives my mind traction, links and engages it in the real world; it is the other stick that brings the new fire.

Thus for me it is an irreplaceable privilege to be doing what I am, where I am, during this time in history. I am a man who is excited by navigation, not the unloading of cargo. I live to explore, not to settle and consolidate. I live for battle, not administration.

I fully realize that my joys are not everyone’s joys. If you do not happen to have my particular fetish for the endless swordplay of abstract battles, why on earth would you be interested in exploring and understanding the characteristics of a land you will never set foot on?

Anarchy and Relationships

Within our minds, because of our personal histories, there exists – for want of a better phrase – a kind of “dead zone,” which is the black and broken scar tissue of the endless dictatorial commandments we were subjected to as children.

These commandments may have existed within your own home, but without a doubt this is exactly what you were subjected to in school. When you were a young child, opening up and exploring your own mind, and the new world before you, your teachers – and by proxy, your parents – never asked you what you most wanted to learn and explore.

Instead, you were jammed into a little desk, in a tight boxlike row with other children, while a teacher scratched with grating chalk on an old blackboard. Your individuality was not respected and explored; the natural and specific direction of your mind was not harnessed and expanded; your latent talents and abilities were not teased and conjured into full, magnificent view.

This was a dictatorial, almost entirely one-sided “relationship” – and this “relationship” showed up in school, in church, and very likely at home as well. Who really cared what you thought? Who really cared what you preferred to do? Were you not in general treated, at home, in school and at church, as a generally disobedient and largely inconvenient kind of pet? Did people talk to you, ask you questions, sit down and open you up to yourself – or did they feed you, clothe you, wash you and manage you? Was your childhood a more or less endless series of little commandments and “suggestions” – put that down, pick that up, don’t go there, go here, share, be nice, don’t raise your voice, go and read a book, turn that off, brush your teeth, finish your homework, don’t use those words, use these words, stop playacting, calm down, go to bed, wake up – all of these teeth-gritting and petty commandments circle your childhood like an endless buzzing cloud of little gnats, that can never be swatted, are never full, and can never be escaped.

In the face of the needs and preferences of others – particularly those in authority – do we not fall back on a kind of empty, dull and resentful conformity? When others get irritated with us – particularly in our personal relationships – do we not either flash up with resentment, or sink back with resentment? Do we not either bully back, or surrender and plot?

When we explore anarchy as a theoretical ideal, we slowly and surely – and painfully – make gradual inroads back into this “dead zone.” Like the last man in a city struggling to start the generator that will bring it back to life, when we continually re-imagine what it is like to sit on the other side of that negotiating table, we re-grow these deadened nerve endings of resentful conformity and dull compliance.

In the statist paradigm, we listen only to God, and obey His commandments.

In the anarchist paradigm, God also listens to us, and we negotiate as equals.

When we mentally practice sitting on the other side of that negotiating table, we re-learn a lesson that has long been pounded out of us – the lesson of empathy and mutually-advantageous debate. When we imagine being a DRO owner and attempting to sell our services to a community, we challenge and break the mental habits of evasion or compliance to authority.

By far the most popular video that I have ever produced has been an off-the-cuff discussion of how best to approach a job interview. This video explicitly follows anarchic principles, in so far as I remind people that although they are being interviewed, they are also the ones doing the interviewing, and evaluating the person who is evaluating them. In the same way, when you are on a first date, if you only worry about how you are being perceived, rather than being curious about how you are perceiving the other person, then you are not in fact having a relationship at all, but rather are acting out an empty form of self-erasure and compliance to the needs and preferences of someone else.

When you explore the anarchic paradigm of human interactions, you continually imagine sitting on the other side of the negotiating table and attempting to provide benefits to yourself.

In the statist paradigm, we struggle to exist under a coercive and one-sided monopoly. We never practice sitting on the other side of that table, because there is no other side to that table, any more than slaves get to negotiate their wages. We seethe with resentment or hysterical “Stockholm Syndrome” patriotism, but we no more think of reasoning with our political masters then we think of trying to control a plane psychically while jammed in the back of “economy class.”

When we are on the receiving end of brutal and coercive instructions, our self-esteem, our very souls, fade and flicker and diminish and collapse. We cannot think of ourselves fundamentally as having value because we are never treated as if we have value in and of ourselves. Our teachers seem constantly irritated with us, our parents are constantly correcting and managing us, and our preachers are constantly informing us of our sins.

Self-esteem has a lot to do with believing (or at least understanding) that we have value in and of ourselves, and that our feelings and thoughts are worthy of consideration. We are treated so little this way when we are children that I strongly believe that we grow up fundamentally scarred in our ability to comprehend our own independent value.

For instance, I can only remember one incident in my childhood when I was able to sit with an adult and chat in a relaxed fashion – and be asked questions – for any length of time. It was with a camp counselor, when I was 13 or so. I couldn’t sleep, and we sat out front of our cabin, looking up at the stars, and chatting easily back and forth about our thoughts. (I clearly remember him telling me that everyone thought Frankenstein was the monster, when in fact it was the name of the doctor who created him – and I know that I remember that for very clear reasons, to do with my family! For anyone who is interested, I used that interaction as the basis of the sleepover conversation between the two girls in my novel “The God of Atheists.”)

When we repeatedly picture the natural “win-win” interactions of an anarchist society, we unconsciously remind ourselves that we are worthy of being negotiated with, and that other people have to bring value to the table if they want to interact with us – that we do not exist simply to fulfill the greedy needs of others.

This mental exercise has staggering benefits in our personal relationships – and is the surest and most stable set of bricks that we can use to build a bridge to the future. Once we get used to the idea that we are worthy of negotiation, and that other people need to bring value to our lives in order to be of value to us, our self-esteem necessarily rises proportionally.

I face this quite often in my conversation with people in a variety of forums, including the Freedomain Board. People will be difficult, or negative, or hostile, or evasive – and genuinely believe that I have some duty or obligation to continue to interact with them.

This is fundamentally a statist position, insofar as these people do not believe that they have to provide consistent or overall value in order to receive resources from others. In the past, before I became an anarchist and practiced this way of thinking, I was very susceptible to this kind of entitlement and manipulation. Now, however, it has become almost funny for me to see the shock that people experience when I simply find interacting with them more negative than positive. Almost inevitably, they will attempt to “rope” me in by attempting to snag me with my own values (“I thought you valued debate!”) – or, if I ban them for being genuinely unpleasant or abusive, they haughtily inform me that I am “censoring” them, and going against “anarchism,” and rejecting the values I proclaim on my very website (“free”) and so on.

The truth of the matter is that I am acting in complete accordance with anarchistic principles when I refrain from interacting with people who do not bring me value. The fact that they are unable to “sit on the other side of the table” and empathize with my perception of the interaction only tells me that they have a long way to go in the journey towards understanding what voluntarism really means. The idea that I – or anyone – “owe” them any form of interaction is entirely statist in its essence. It is the belief that value does not have to be reciprocal, that one side can dictate terms to the other – and, most fundamentally, and most subtly, that the “values” of the person not receiving value should force them to continue the interaction. (“Don’t you love your country?”)

When we get used to sitting on both sides of the table, so to speak, it becomes that much harder to exploit us, and press us into the service of other people’s neurotic defenses, needs and desires. We get habitually used to “checking in” with our own feelings, to see whether or not we are enjoying a particular interaction – and if we are not, we feel perfectly free to disengage. We do not “owe” other people time, energy or resources – they must “earn” our attention through positivity, just as an entrepreneur must “earn” our business through the provision of value.

When we raise our standards in this manner, it is certainly true that large numbers of people will react with incomprehension (and sometimes hostility), because we are in a very real sense rewriting our social contract with those around us. Before, they could count on us to provide them with what they wanted, and they did not have to trouble themselves by considering what we wanted. When we begin to require reciprocity in our relationships, people tend to get upset with us, because we are in fact highlighting their own entitled narcissism.

To give a minor example, as you may know I give listener conversations for free over the Internet, which I then publish as podcasts if the listener agrees. The majority of people politely request these conversations – however, a not-insignificant minority simply inform me that they are “ready” for a conversation. This is always surprising to me, the idea that I somehow “owe” them a conversation, because I am “dedicated” to philosophy and mental health. (This entitlement is all the more jaw-dropping when these people tell me in advance that they do not want to this conversation released as a podcast – and don’t even offer to donate either!)

Helping people to understand that they need to provide value in their relationships is a very tricky and challenging endeavor – but one that is vastly easier with people who have genuinely and deeply explored anarchism and voluntarism, particularly in their own personal relationships.

Once people understand that if they do not provide value in their relationships, they do not in fact have relationships, but rather are just using people in an exploitive manner, then they can work to undo the damage of the legacy that they have inherited from their family and their school and their church, which is that you either take value from people, or you give value to people – but a mutual exchange of value is not possible. You either steal, or you are stolen from – this is not the best paradigm for having a strong, deep and emotional understanding of the “free market of relationships” that is the primary characteristic of an anarchic world view.

Thus, exploring anarchy will free you in your world right now, the world you actually live in, the world of your professional, familial and social relationships. Learning how to negotiate from both sides of the table will make you a more powerful and effective employee; a better and more loving spouse; a happier and more credible parent – it will bring you all the joys and liberties of a free society, even as you labor under excessive taxation and regulation.

Finally – and not insignificantly – the more that we can teach people, directly or by example, that relationships must be mutually beneficial in order to be considered positive, the more we will teach people that the State is evil, because it is one-sided, and violent, and exploitive.

The world will be free of the State when we finally see that the State is inferior to all of our personal and professional relationships. When we are completely used to thinking in terms of mutual advantage, the violent exploitation of the State will finally become clear to us, and it will fall away.

Some of the greatest movies of the past ten years explored what it is like to live in an illusion. “The Sixth Sense,” “Fight Club” – and, greatest of all, “The Matrix.”

Let’s start with a spoiler or two, shall we?

In “The Matrix,” a young man is awakened from a computer-generated imaginary world to find that he is enslaved by robots who are paralyzing him with the illusion of life in order to harvest his electrical energy.

This is a wonderful metaphor on many levels, and tells us an enormous amount about our “relationship” with truth and reality.

In the movie, the robots that were originally invented to serve mankind end up ruling mankind and spinning an illusory “reality” which keeps their former masters entombed in the mere appearance of a life.

My take on this metaphor is that it is really describing propaganda.

For instance, the government is an institution that was originally designed to serve citizens – “government by and for the people.”

However, as we have seen countless times, what we create to serve us ends up ruling us.

Governments that were supposedly created to keep our property safe from thieves now steal upwards of 50% of our income under the guise of “taxation.”

Governments were supposedly created to give us participation in the “democratic process” – yet if we do not agree with whatever those in the government decree, we are threatened with violence and imprisonment.

Through the endless infliction of pro-state propaganda in government schools, we grow up believing in mad illusions such as “countries,” “virtuous violence,” “participative democracy,” “voluntary taxation,” “moral murder” in the form of “armies” and so on.

In our churches, we are taught as children to believe that deranged fairy tales represent objective and absolute truth. We are expected to believe with all seriousness that we are evil because a woman made from the rib of a man listened to a talking snake. We are asked to swallow the proposition that an invisible being who drowned almost everyone in the world is the very paragon of virtue.

In our families, we are taught that our relations are virtuous and have value simply because they share some of our DNA – while at the same time being told that racism is evil.

In our relationships, we are taught that “love” can be willed, that others owe us affection, obedience and respect, and that bullying is the same as being assertive.

Standing at the border of a country, we see that the land does not change color, as indicated on maps. Gravity does not change as we step across this imaginary line; reason, physics and morality remain utterly constant.

We believe – or rather, the belief is inflicted upon us – that we owe allegiance to imaginary lines, imaginary gods, and the imaginary virtue of our tribe.

Awakening from these mad dreams is a disorienting, frightening and wonderful experience.

Philosophy is the tool that we use to undo our illusions.

Philosophy reveals to us the simple truths that are self-evident to toddlers, yearned for by teenagers – and attacked and dismissed by most adults.

Philosophy is in its essence about relationships – the relationship between a statement and its truth-value; the relationship between logic and empiricism, “self” and “other,” choice and virtue, integrity and happiness – the mind and reality.

However, most importantly, philosophy is about our relationships with each other.

Philosophy – like all knowledge – is a communal endeavour, since it cannot exist without the collective and accumulated values of language, prior thought – and our shared capacity to process sensory reality.

A man born alone on a desert island cannot practice medicine, or science – or philosophy.

Philosophy reveals the truth to us about our relations with each other, with reality, and with truth itself.

If we are free, philosophy will strengthen our wings.

If we are enslaved, philosophy will weaken our chains.

Culture

Most books about relationships will talk about your spouse, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your children and so on.

We will address all these in this book, but I have also included an analysis of your relationship to your society in terms of religion, politics and culture.

I don’t believe that it’s possible to effectively analyze and improve our interactions with others without taking into account the larger social or philosophical context that we inhabit. If we are to achieve our goals of honesty, integrity and true personal freedom, the values that were inflicted upon us as children by culture must be rigorously examined.

The directions that a passerby gives us will do us little good if our overall map is wrong.

Thus, this book will touch on your social, cultural and political relationships and the impact they have on your personal relationships. Since your emotional reactions to these issues can be as strong as anything you feel about your personal relationships, excluding them from a book designed to give you happiness and peace of mind would leave the world at best half unexamined.

Philosophy and Intimacy

As I discussed in my two previous books – “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion,” and “Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics,” mythology is the opposite of truth, since it provides the illusion of truth and so prevents further exploration.

In this book I will argue that truth is a necessary prerequisite for intimacy.

“On Truth” was primarily about our relationship with our parents in the past. “Universally Preferable Behaviour” was primarily about our relationship with truth, reality and virtue in the present.

This book is primarily about our relationship with ourselves and others in the future.

It is a book about honesty of the most challenging and rewarding kind: honesty with – and about – yourself.

Most times in life, we do not even know that we are lying. We do not know that we are failing to process reality – both inner and outer – correctly because we are addicted to mythology, or making up stories which drug us with the illusion of truth, rather than humbly pursuing truth in reality.

In our collective past, mythology dominated our thinking – particularly in the realms of ethics, society and reality. In the realm of ethics, we constructed vast imaginary entities such as gods, nations, states, classes and so on, all of which inevitably caused us to surrender our autonomy and sense of personal control to the tall tales of madmen.

With regards to society – particularly family – we substituted blood and accidental proximity for virtue. We were – and are – trained by those who accidentally rule us biologically to submit to those who accidentally rule us geographically.

With regards to reality, we imagined that lurid, corrupt and insane tales about gods, devils and talking snakes could provide us some sort of truth about the material world.

The humility required to subject our wild and narcissistic imaginings to the twin disciplines of logic and evidence has been sorely lacking throughout human history, and it is not hard to see the effects of this lack of humility in the realms of science in the past and ethics in the present.

In the realm of our relationships, however, we remain positively medieval.

In the Middle Ages, when an eclipse was observed a myth was invented to “explain” the event. God was angry, a witch is among us, sinners abound and so on. Some senseless and brutal sacrifice was made, some hellish amalgam of torture and murder was inflicted on some hapless epileptic or imbecile, and “order” was restored – and anxiety reduced – to the temporary relief of all.

In the same way, in our personal relationships, when discomforts arise, we create stories to “explain away” our emotions.

If a man causes us anxiety, then he is “aggressive.” If a woman rejects us, then she is “cold.” If our child criticizes us, then he is “ungrateful.” If we get fired, our boss is “vindictive.” If our wife leaves us, women are “selfish.”

Religious “Reality”

In the religious approach to “truth,” the priest makes a prediction – “worship my God and your harvest will be good” – and then invents “sinners” to take the blame if his prediction fails to materialize. In this way, the possibility of disproof – of personal responsibility for the priest – is eliminated.

All too often this is our default position in relationships as well.

We enter into relationships based on our predictions of how they will turn out. Who but a masochist would continue dating a woman if he knew for certain she would break his heart within six months? Would you marry a woman and have children with her if you knew that she would divorce you and take you for everything you had?

Of course not.

We make predictions about relationships – and then, when those predictions fail to come true, we invent “sinners” to take the blame.

We embark upon our relationships with the highest hopes and ambitions and then, when they crash in flames or peter out into nothing, we begin mythologizing the reasons why.

Compared to medieval priests, we are often more sophisticated in our defences nowadays. We provide quasi-enlightened reasons as to why our relationships fail, which on the surface seem to contain some aspects of personal responsibility, but which are really the same old mythologies dressed up in new psychological garb.

For instance, if my marriage fails because I work too hard and ignore my wife and children, I may openly confess that I worked too hard – but then, inevitably, self-pitying justifications will creep into my explanation…

“My wife left me because I worked most Saturdays and spent two or three days a week on the road. I definitely should have spent more time at home, but then of course she really liked the vacations on the French Riviera, and the children apparently really needed their ski lessons, and she did install that kiln in our basement for her pottery. I should have put my foot down earlier and forced her to make a decision, and not just let her desire for more and more stuff keep driving me back to the office!”

Implicit in this kind of mealy-mouthed “explanation” is the basic premise that, “My wife is a greedy materialist who wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She wanted all this great stuff, she wanted all the status that came with the big house and a nice car, but she also wanted me to be home to take care of her as well!”

You often hear the same complaint with regards to sex. For instance, a man may say:

“I’m not allowed to have an affair, because I am married – yet my wife refuses to have sex with me, so I’m totally stuck. She holds a monopoly veto on our sex life, which she uses constantly – yet I am not allowed to look outside the marriage for sex!”

Wives have similar complaints about their husbands:

“He says that he wants to help me around the house, but then he does everything so badly that I am forced to run around fixing everything up after him, so that it turns out to be more work than it’s worth!”

Or:

“He always complains that I nag him too much, but I wouldn’t have to repeat myself if he only listened to me in the first place! If he just took the garbage out when I asked him to, I wouldn’t have to keep asking him!”

Or:

“He thinks that having sex will make us close. I keep telling him that I can only have sex with him if I feel close already. That just makes him angry – and then he expects me to want to have sex with him because he’ll get pouty if I don’t!”

Positioning

As we can see, conflicts in relationships so often escalate into subtle put-down exercises, wherein a frantic and insistent kind of positioning occurs: “I am right and you are wrong” – or, more accurately: “I am good and you are bad.”

How many times do we hear people complain about their relationships, basically saying, “If my partner only did the right thing, everything would be great!”

This is a mad kind of mythological fantasy – not to mention completely paralyzing.

When things go wrong we have a great tendency to avoid the pain of responsibility by making up stories that blame others, or circumstances, or fate, or God and so on.

Responsibility can be very painful, and mythology provides an instant relief for this pain. In particular, blame is a very addictive form of self-medication which helps us avoid the pain of responsibility – but also traps us in negative, difficult or even dangerous situations.

The Arc of a Relationship

A typical dysfunctional romantic relationship tends to have distinct phases.

Caution

When two people meet and are romantically interested in each other, there tends to be a phase of initial caution in which they examine each other for potential compatibility.

We will call this man “Bruce,” and this woman “Sheila.”

The more functional the individuals, the longer this phase lasts. If an insecure woman is looking for an insecure man, this phase tends to be very short. When they first meet, she looks for “markers” indicating low levels of self-esteem. These can include a lack of eye contact, a nervous laugh, tattoos, drug use, compulsive joke-telling, underachievement, pomposity, or a kind of baseless arrogance.

Once Sheila establishes that Bruce’s self-esteem is either genuinely low or artificially “high,” she immediately feels more comfortable with him.

Sheila has low self-esteem because she believes things that are not true about herself and others. She remains insecure because she is actively preferring short-term gains to long-term gains. For instance, if she has an abusive father, but stays in touch with him, then she is choosing continued abuse (long-term pain) in order to avoid the anxiety of confrontation (short-term pain).

Since Sheila has developed an “avoidance mechanism” for dealing with her anxiety, inviting a man of true moral courage and integrity into her life would be a disaster for her illusions. Such a man would immediately see that she was being abused by her father and would care enough about her to encourage her to either improve her relationship with her father or get him out of her life. (A wiser and more experienced man would know that she cannot improve her “relationship” with her abusive father, which would be even more anxiety provoking for her.)

If Sheila chose to continue her relationship with her father, a moral man would realize that she is habitually sacrificing ethics, virtue, integrity and self-esteem for the sake of immediate anxiety avoidance. This means that throughout her life, abusive people will forever control her behaviour, and she will continually sacrifice the good people around her for the sake of appeasing the evil or corrupt people.

None of us can sustain any moral decision in the absence of at least the appearance of an ethical justification. If a man of self-esteem confronts a woman who enables abusers, she will be inevitably drawn to defend her appeasement on “moral” grounds. “Family is an innate value.” “I think it’s important to be a good daughter.” “Forgiveness is a virtue.”

In other words, the woman is not just amoral, but rather anti-moral, because she just makes up “moral” justifications for her cowardly actions.

No man of genuine self-esteem could stay in a relationship with such a corrupt woman, since she uses virtuous definitions to enable her own subjugation to evil. In particular, no moral man would ever have children with such a woman, who would inevitably raise them as frightened and obedient or rebellious slaves.

Since all of this is well-known unconsciously, a woman of low self-esteem is inevitably bound to end up dating a man of low self-esteem. We can think of this relationship as essentially a mutual covenant to maintain corrupt falsehoods. “Let me believe my lies, and I’ll let you believe yours.”

Of course, like all corrupt falsehoods, it cannot last.

Sex

After the self-esteem issue has been established, the dating aspect of the relationship can begin.

In the case of insecure individuals, sexuality always makes a premature entrance. Since a woman of low self-esteem does not have any genuine virtues to offer a man, such as courage, integrity, nobility and so on, she must create value in some other manner.

Typically, the “value” that this type of woman brings to the early part of a relationship is sexual availability.

The Love Bomb

In many cults, potential recruits are subjected to what is often called a “love bomb,” wherein massive amounts of artificial affection are injected into a mostly-empty soul. This tends to wash away any lingering sense of personal boundaries and judgment, triggering what psychologists call “fusion,” or the uncritical elevation of an individual to a status of near-deific perfection.

The introduction of a highly-sexualized interaction produces a biochemical form of euphoria, which typically lasts from three to six months. During this time, ego boundaries tend to dissolve, there are few if any difficult decisions to be made, there tends to be an isolation from both friends and family – and the cycle of sexual tension, desire and release tends to consume the mind and body.

The Plateau

At the highest point of this interaction, the couple tends to make decisions about their long-term futures.

This is akin to deciding whether or not you can fly while high on PCP.

This is when couples decide to commit in some significant manner, such as moving in together, or getting engaged, or simply planning a permanent future.

The Hiccup

Shortly after the commitment is made, the couple begins to re-enter the world, and the sexual euphoria begins to wear off. At the same time, they begin to deal with the mundane practicalities of negotiating their living arrangements and/or potential nuptials, as well as entering as a couple into a more complex social world.

As they begin to re-enter the world, interactions with friends and family begin to influence the couple. Bruce begins to see what Sheila is really like around her mother. Sheila begins to notice that Bruce’s brother drinks to excess, and Bruce says nothing. He sees how shrill she becomes around her friends; she sees how susceptible he is to peer pressure.

The Descent

As Sheila and Bruce begin to make decisions about their lives together, they notice that their lack of boundaries is beginning to cause real friction in their negotiations. Also, since they have spent so much time having sex instead of learning how to actually communicate with each other, they find that their level of commitment is far ahead of their ability to negotiate. They have bonded out of euphoria, neediness, relief and hyper-sexuality, rather than mutual respect and regard for one another.

At this point, the woman generally becomes less sexually available.

The reason for this is the underlying low self-esteem that caused the hyper-sexuality in the first place.

Since she had little intrinsic value to offer Bruce initially, Sheila substituted sex for self-worth.

As their relationship progresses, however, and the sexual euphoria wears off, she begins to feel resentment towards sex.

One way to understand this transition is to picture a rich and insecure man who dazzles his dates with extravagant outings. He flies them to Paris, takes them out on his yacht, buys them jewellery, and drapes them in fur. Naturally, they respond with “devotion” and “ardour.”

As the relationship develops, however, he begins to resent the need for constant extravagance. “Would she really love me if I didn’t buy her things?” he wonders. In order to find this out, he becomes increasingly irritable towards her desire for gifts. When she suggests a weekend away on the French Riviera, he rolls his eyes and snaps at her.

The same insecurity about his own intrinsic value that caused him to lavish gifts on her now causes him to withdraw his “generosity.” The same insecurity that prevented him from offering himself to her without “extras” now causes him to withdraw those extras, in the mad hope that she will find him valuable without gifts.

In other words, after buying her, he hopes that she is not in it for the money.

This is how it works with female sexuality after the initial phase of euphoria.

Lots of sex in the beginning means a whole lot less sex later on.

Lying

As negotiations about mutual living arrangements, sexuality and social life become more and more difficult, it also becomes more and more difficult for Sheila and Bruce to retrace their steps and figure out where they went wrong at the beginning.

For instance, as Sheila’s resentment towards sex begins to rise, she will tend to make up excuses as to why she doesn’t want sex – and those excuses are not designed to fool Bruce, but rather to fool herself.

She will claim that she is tired, or that she has to get up early. She will snap that he is only ever interested in “one thing,” or that she doesn’t feel “close enough” to have sex, or that he is doing a million and one things wrong, which is killing her sexual desire, and so on.

The truth of the matter is that she is making up stories – inventing “sinners” – in order to avoid the truth about her own growing repugnance towards sex.

If Sheila were to speak with total honesty, she would say something like this:

“Bruce, I had a lot of sex with you early on because I don’t feel like I’m worth much of anything. The fact that you were willing to have sex with me despite the fact that I was manipulating you tells me everything that I need to know about your level of integrity, and capacity to love. If you really loved me, you would not pressure me to have sex when I feel depressed. If I were really lovable, I would not have used sex to create artificial value.”

The end result of this kind of conversation, of course, is the termination of the relationship – which is why it is so studiously avoided, and a million distractions are invented in order to avoid that core reality.

Entombment

As conflicts begin to rise, Bruce and Sheila enter the phase of “slow entombment.”

In this phase, conflicts which cannot be resolved generally start to be avoided. If Bruce does not like Sheila’s parents, and it upsets her when he talks about them, the “solution” becomes to simply not talk about her parents.

Similarly, if Sheila dislikes Bruce’s drinking, and it upsets him when she brings it up, they “solve” the problem either by her refraining from bringing it up, or by him beginning to drink in secret.

This process continues unabated. Bit by bit, unresolved conflicts create localized minefields that prohibit free movement and spontaneity. “Don’t go there” becomes a near-constant mantra.

Since the solution to anxiety is to control the other person’s behaviour which “causes” the anxiety, the relationship turns into a kind of “soft tyranny.” Since it is considered “wrong” to cause the other person anxiety, any behaviour which results in anxiety must be banned as immoral.

Over the next few months or years a creeping paralysis enters into the relationship, as more and more topics become “off limits.”

As spontaneity and authenticity become less and less possible and the endless regulations of behaviour pile up, inevitable resentments begin to creep in. Both Sheila and Bruce feel over-controlled, and their interactions become more and more rigid and empty. The cowardice that lies at the root of controlling each other in order to manage their own anxiety becomes more and more evident as time goes on.

Generally, there are two possibilities for this kind of endless increase in the bureaucratic hyper-regulation of the relationship. If neither party takes a “stand,” then the abusive “rules” continue to pile up until one or both parties wake up one day completely unable to breathe. An overwhelming rush of frustration – or perhaps a full-fledged panic attack – takes hold, and there is a sudden and savage breakup.

The second possibility is for the “fronts” in this subterranean war to harden. This is analogous to a guerrilla conflict turning into the frozen hell of First World War trench warfare.

In this second scenario, each party picks one or a few fixed positions and just continues to pound their partner on the basis of those. For Bruce, it might be the lack of sex. For Sheila, it might be the lack of emotional participation in the relationship, or help around the house, or some such topic.

Unconsciously, this represents a desperate attempt to stop the endless proliferation of petty rules, since both Sheila and Bruce instinctively understand the inevitable result of that process. Rather than moving on from each prior conflict, thus generating new conflicts which must be avoided by the creation of new “rules,” Sheila and Bruce start to repetitively attack each other on the grounds of just a few particular issues. This prevents the creation of new rules – thus staving off the end of the relationship – at the price of remaining trapped in endless circling conflicts.

In fact, Sheila and Bruce remain drawn to these few particular conflicts and cannot leave them alone. An unconscious “contract” is created, wherein any frustration about new problems is channeled into a replay of some agreed-upon existing conflict. This is just another way of avoiding the inevitable end of the relationship that would result from “dealing” with new problems.

This second scenario is the route most often taken by couples with children. Since the stakes of ending a relationship are far higher for parents, they tend to revert to this “broken record” form of problem avoidance rather than allow the escalation of new problems to destroy their relationship.

The Aftermath

Earlier, we talked about how the religious approach to “truth” is to make predictions, and then invent “sinners” to take the blame when those predictions fail to come true.

After Bruce and Sheila break up, they will invariably begin the process of inventing scapegoats or “sinners” to take the blame for the failure of their relationship.

This failure was not primarily the relationship itself, but rather their own predictions about the relationship.

They entered into a relationship with each other based on the prediction that they would stay together and be happy. Early on, they openly praised each other to the skies, to themselves and their friends and family.

How, then, can they explain the dismal failure of the relationship and eventual distaste for each other?

Well, there is really only one way to explain it – see if this seems familiar.

Sheila will say: “He just ended up being a real bastard – and there was no way to predict that at the beginning.”

Bruce will say: “She seemed like a really nice girl, at first – but as it turns out, she had some real issues that she wasn’t willing to address.”

This is the “one-two” punch that is designed to bring down the truth. “I was correct when I praised her early on, and I am now also correct when I condemn her at the end.”

This mythology provides relief from anxiety in the short-term (“How could I have been so careless with my heart?”) while creating far greater anxiety in the long-term.

If a group of villagers live at the base of a volcano, and they ascribe the eruption of the volcano to the anger of the fire god, they will inevitably end up performing various rituals to “appease” this anger. Since these rituals have in fact nothing to do with the eruptions, the villagers end up staying near the mountain, imagining that they are creating some form of safety or predictability.

Imaginary answers create perpetual danger.

The moment that the villagers accept that they cannot predict or control the eruption of the volcano, they will move, thus creating real safety and predictability.

When our predictions fail to come true, we can either attempt to determine why we made such a mistake, or we can make up an imaginary answer – thus guaranteeing a repetition of the mistake.

When a relationship fails, we can either attempt to understand the dangerous clues that were embedded in our interactions from the very beginning – which doubtless existed – or we can just blame the other person for mysteriously “changing.”

If we take the route of blaming the other person, we certainly let ourselves off the hook – but we also guarantee that we will remain blind to cues that we really need to see in the future. By blaming the other person, all we do essentially is say that there is no way to predict the outcome of a relationship based on early interactions. In other words, when it comes to relationships, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best.

This is why it keeps happening.

Win/Lose

Why do these conflicts continually escalate in this manner?

One central tragedy of our lives is that we are so often raised in win/lose relationships. If our parents get offended, we are punished. If our teacher gets angry, we get detention. If we want something, someone else must give up something.

This same pattern repeats itself in all of our adult relationships.

Most lovers only know how to “get their way” through either overt aggression, or passive aggression (in general, the male and female tools, respectively).

Men say: “If I don’t get what I want, I will be angry.”

Women say: “If I don’t get what I want, I will be sad.”

These strategies generally result from a fundamentally narcissistic approach to the world. The possibility of a win-win negotiation is never considered, because it has never been taught or demonstrated.

Let’s take a more concrete example.

My wife Christina really enjoys watching a television show called “Dancing with the Stars.” I do like watching the dance routines, but have a tough time making it through all the filler and commercials. Last night, I went upstairs to get a DVD for us to watch and then when I came downstairs saw that Christina had found the show on TV and was settling in to watch it.

I would have preferred it if she had not found the show – so that we could watch the DVD – but that was sort of out of my hands at this point.

Many couples would look upon this as a win/lose situation – that Christina would watch the show and I would suffer through the filler and commercials, or that Christina would not get to watch her show, and watch the DVD I chose instead. Or, perhaps, that Christina would tape the show and watch it on her own, or some other solution.

However, although I would have preferred to watch the DVD, I sat down and happily watched the dancing show.

How is that possible?

Well, quite simply it is possible because I take an enormous amount of pleasure in my wife’s pleasure. (Shoe shopping excepted, of course – I am only a mortal man!)

I love watching the play of delight on my wife’s face and the intensity of her enjoyment. To take pleasure in the pleasure of another human being is foundational to a loving relationship. It certainly is true that I would have received 100% pleasure from watching the DVD, and 90% pleasure from watching my wife’s enjoyment of the dancing show, but I can scarcely claim to be hard done by because I had to choose between 100% pleasure and 90% pleasure!

If you cannot take pleasure in your partner’s pleasure, then win-win negotiations become impossible. If I got +100% pleasure from watching my DVD, and -100% pleasure from watching the dancing show – and if my wife faced the reverse proposition – then one of us would have to win, and the other would have to lose.

This concept of the “minor sacrifice” is something that every couple should openly discuss and work on. I very much want my wife to be happy in our marriage, because if she is not happy then I cannot be happy either. If I get exactly what I want every single time, no matter what her preferences, then it is impossible – according to the principles of Universally Preferable Behaviour – for her to remain happy.

Since my happiness depends on remaining married to her, my happiness can never in general exceed hers in the long run.

Trust

Our resistance to this kind of openhearted generosity arises out of our fear of exploitation.

We say to ourselves: “If I give her what she wants every single time, I will never get what I want. She will take advantage of my generosity, and I will end up a slave to her every whim, and never get my needs met!”

My response to this is:

If that is true, then you should know it before you get involved!

When I was younger, I went out with a woman who openly said that she expected me to pay for our outings. “A man’s generosity is financial; a woman’s generosity is composed of… other things,” she said seductively.

I was somewhat alarmed by her perspective, but I decided to give it a shot. I did pay for our outings, without complaint, and then waited for reciprocity.

It never came, and the relationship ended. I was sad, but never looked back.

Closure and Self–Trust

To achieve true happiness and peace of mind, we must come to a resolution about each relationship in our lives – what is commonly called “closure.”

“Closure” is the achievement of self-trust in our own judgment. Fundamentally, we never really trust others, but rather only ourselves. It was not this woman that I needed to trust, but my own judgment about her proposition.

When we doubt, generosity always provides certainty.

In my 20s, I was involved in a long-term relationship with a woman who wanted to get into the filmmaking business. After watching her struggle for some time, I decided to write and fund a movie for her. We did end up making the movie, which did quite well.

A month or two after we had finished making the movie, I asked her to reread an unpublished novel of mine that she had criticized, and give me suggestions for improvements. She half-heartedly agreed to do so, but week after week went by and she never picked up the manuscript.

Eventually I confronted her on this, and explained my hurt feelings and mistrust of her capacity for reciprocity. She replied that the reason she had not read my novel was because I had not “motivated” her to do so. Naturally, I responded that she had not “motivated” me to spend a small fortune making a film to further her career, but rather I had done so out of a desire to help her!

This relationship also did not last for very long after this interaction.

I am by nature more cautious than generous, and I do find trusting others a challenge. In the above cases, though, generosity was the most liberating approach I could have conceivably taken. If I had hedged my bets in either of these relationships, and given 1% more while waiting for 1% more reciprocity, I would never have achieved certainty.

In relationships – particularly romantic relationships – generosity creates certainty. Giving 150% of yourself – even beyond your own “comfort zone” – quickly highlights any deficiencies in reciprocity from your partner.

When I first met my wife Christina, her capacity for love and devotion far outstripped my own. I had been somewhat scarred in the romantic trenches of my youth, and it took some time for my own heart to open up to match her generosity. I did openly talk about my difficulties in this area with her, however, which helped alleviate her concerns. “I am trying to open my heart as quickly as possible,” I said, “because you certainly deserve my full affections, but I am having trouble matching your openness.”

In the same way, if I owe monetary debt, but am temporarily unable to pay it, I am morally bound to inform my creditor of the situation, reaffirm my commitment to pay, and work like hell to get hold of the money.

Hedging

Couples get continually stuck in the tug-of-war of conditional reciprocity – “I gave you a back rub, now you owe me sex!” – which always creates more and more resentment. Not only is such “generosity” totally undercut through the expectation of reciprocity (“I’ll take out the garbage if you do the dishes”) but the degree of mistrust that is communicated by this sort of “grudging giving” is overwhelmingly insulting at its root.

If I told you that you were my best friend, and you asked me to lend you $5,000, and I said to you: “Let’s just start with $5, and see where it goes from there,” would you feel elevated by my response?

Of course not. You would be insulted. “How can you call me your best friend, and not trust me with any sum larger than five dollars?”

“Well,” I might reply, “some people in my past never paid me back.”

Here we run into a fundamental problem, which is at the root of countless relationship discords.

Baggage

We all arrive with scars, and that is not a bad thing. A boxer without scars has never fought an equal, and a lover without baggage has never risked his heart. To some degree we do learn through pain, and being on the receiving end of falsehoods and betrayal can do wonders to sharpen our criteria for trustworthiness.

However, we do run into a fundamental problem when we mistrust our lover.

Either she really is untrustworthy – in which case we chose to enter into an intimate and lengthy relationship with an untrustworthy woman – or, she is trustworthy, but we have a hard time trusting because we have been betrayed in the past.

If we have been betrayed in the past, though, we have either learned who to trust or we have not. If we have learned who to trust – primarily ourselves – then we cannot reasonably call our current partner untrustworthy.

If we have not learned to trust, then we cannot blame our current partner for being untrustworthy.

To explain what I mean by this, let us return to our “loan” example.

First I tell you that you are my best friend, and then I refuse to lend you any money because I have lent and lost money in the past.

“Well,” you say, “are you still ‘best friends’ with those who ran off with your money?”

“Of course not!” I reply indignantly.

“Thus you find untrustworthiness to be a trait unworthy of someone you call a best friend?”

“Yes.”

“Thus anyone you call your best friend must be the opposite of the people who harmed you in the past.”

“Yes.”

“Thus if you tell me that you are afraid that I will not pay you back, then you are telling me that I am untrustworthy. However, since you have rejected those who failed to pay you back in the past because they were untrustworthy, but you claim that I am your best friend, then you are in the illogical position of claiming that I am both trustworthy and untrustworthy at the same time. If I am trustworthy, then I surely have earned the title ‘best friend,’ and you should lend the money to me. If I am untrustworthy, then it is unjust to call me your ‘best friend,’ since you find untrustworthiness such a vile character trait.”

Thus keeping people in our lives who exhibit traits we call negative utterly prohibits us from blaming them for exhibiting those traits. If we act in opposition to our beliefs, we cannot reasonably blame other people for the results.

In the same way, when the fateful words “I love you” escape our lips, they cannot be reasonably construed as a recipe, but rather as a fully digested meal. We cannot reasonably say, “I love you, but I do not trust you.” We cannot reasonably say, “I love you, but I expect you to think and act completely differently in the future.”

But of course we use the words “I love you” for almost every purpose except what they actually mean.

Love

“Love” is a word that is subjected to such fantastical delusions that reclaiming its right meaning seems a near-impossible task. The word is flung around to mean anything from fetishistic attachment to co-dependency to “loyalty” towards rabid delusions such as gods and countries.

There are some things, however, that we must be able to agree on if we are to come to some reasonable understanding about how to improve the quality of our relationships.

Love and Objectivity

First of all, love must be a state that has at least some objective qualities. If love is a completely subjective state, then the concept of “quality” does not exist at all – and thus neither does “improvement.”

Furthermore, saying to someone “I love you” is a meaningless statement if the phrase merely represents purely internal or subjective preferences. We can say “I love jazz,” but jazz is not a conscious entity and can flow from a CD. To proclaim love for another human being, however, is to say that our internal state is elicited by another person. In other words, the “you” in “I love you” involves objectivity, since we experience each other through the medium of empirical reality.

If another person elicits our internal state, then some objectivity must be accepted.

Secondly, we must also accept that the word “love” represents something other than a merely chosen preference. We cannot pick a woman out of a crowd and command ourselves to love her. In other words, love must be somehow related to the actions of another person, and not simply willed. None of us would feel particularly flattered if someone told us they “loved” us while knowing nothing about us.

Thus “love” must be in its essence a reaction to the objective actions of another human being.

Thirdly, the feelings of affection that are elicited by the actions of another person cannot be entirely contradictory. My wife cannot tell me that she loves me because I am honest, and that she also loves my brother because he is dishonest. I cannot love a person because of his loyalty, and then claim to love another person equally because of her disloyalty.

Love – Compared to What?

One of the most fundamental questions in philosophy – and psychology – is the question: “Compared to what?” When I say that a proposition is “true,” then I mean that it is true compared to something else – falsehood, or inconsistency with internal logic or empirical validation.

Similarly, when we look at the question of love, clearly love is an expression of a preference. Naturally, we must then ask, “A preference – compared to what?”

If I say that I love honesty, then clearly I love it compared to dishonesty. If I say that I love virtue, then clearly I love virtue compared to vice or corruption.

Now, since we can only determine the traits of another human being through empirical observation, our experience of “love” must involve the actions of another (said actions can include words, of course). Just as our conception of “tall” is derived from the objective (i.e. measurable) characteristics of a man – and “tall” is valid relative to the average height of a human male – just so is our experience of “love” derived from the objective characteristics (words and actions) of another human being.

Thus “love” must be valid relative to an objective and external standard, which we shall work to define shortly.

Internal State, or External Fact?

The question then arises: to what degree is love valid relative to an objective and external standard?

Love cannot be completely and utterly defined by an objective and external standard, since that would mean that everyone must love the one person in the world who most completely conforms to that standard, which would be absurd. If we said that love was valid relative to height, then everyone in the world must love the tallest person, which flies in the face of the obvious variety of personal preferences the world over.

If I say that I like ice cream, then clearly I prefer ice cream to other foods that I relatively dislike. This is a largely subjective matter.

On the other hand, if I say that I prefer good health, then clearly I am expressing a desire for something that can be measured at least to some degree objectively. I cannot reasonably say that I prefer good health, and that I also prefer dying of cancer.

It is also important to differentiate between standards that can be achieved, and standards that cannot be achieved. If I say that I love good health, and then define “good health” as never getting a cold, sleeping lightly or having a headache, then clearly what I love is unattainable, and my “love” can only be measured relative to varying degrees of disappointment.

Love and Pleasure

It scarcely seems required, but it is worth noting that love must be considered a pleasurable experience. This does not mean that love always entails pleasure – any more than physical health means never experiencing any pain at all – but it must be a positive experience in general.

In other words, the positive aspects of “love” must vastly outweigh the negative aspects, just as the positive aspects of “health” must vastly outweigh the negative aspects, such as eating well and exercising.

A decent rule of thumb is to expect a positive relationship to be composed of 9/10 good things, to 1/10 bad things.

To put this together, we can say that love has the following characteristics:

1. It has elements of objectivity.
2. It is elicited by the behaviour of another person.
3. It is a favouring of certain characteristics relative to their opposites, or deficiencies thereof.
4. It is pleasurable.

Love: A Tentative Definition

I’m going to put forward a tentative definition of love, which conforms to the above requirements. We shall examine this proposition in more detail below.

Love is our involuntary response to virtue.

Science has elements of objectivity, insofar as it relies to some degree on personal inspiration, but must be validated through reason and evidence.

Love also has elements of objectivity, insofar as it relies to some degree on personal preferences, but must be validated through reason and evidence.

Of course, the idea of “validating” love offends our sensibilities to some degree, since love is so often considered to be a form of divine madness or inspiration. What, then, is meant by “validating love”?

Well, in the realm of romantic relationships, we are motivated to a considerable degree by biological attraction, or raw sexual desire. In the same way, we may feel an irrational exuberance of greed when we see an overturned Brinks truck spilling banknotes into the wind. We may even seize some of these banknotes, before shaking our heads and returning our ill-gotten gains.

Philosophy is required because our instincts can lead us astray, as in the case of eating and certain phobias. We may be sexually attracted to certain characteristics such as large breasts or bald heads, but those desires lie squarely in the realm of animal reproduction, rather than what would properly be called “love.” Teenagers may get a fairly strenuous degree of sexual satisfaction from their hand, but this would scarcely be called love.

The world looks flat, but in truth it is round. Some people are sexually attractive, but that does not mean they are lovable.

Since love has elements of objectivity, the objective elements of love must be tied to universal values, the existence of which I proved in my previous book on Universally Preferable Behaviour.

Again, this does not mean that all love is identical. The concept of “health” has elements of objectivity, but is also measurable relative to a variety of standards. A “healthy” AIDS patient is quite different from a healthy athlete. The “healthiest” person in a cancer ward is not healthy relative to the majority of people.

In the same way, we can assume that there is one person in the world who is the very best person for you to be with. Does that mean that you could never be happy with anyone else?

Of course not.

As with all disciplines, we have to weigh the pros and cons of perfection versus attainability. There is also only one “perfect” job in the world for us as well, but we can quite easily starve to death looking for it.

If we look at something like “honesty” as a behavioural trait that elicits admiration, it is true that everyone has differing degrees of commitment to – and execution of – honesty, but there is still an objective difference between honesty and dishonesty.

If I value honesty – and I am honest myself – then I will value somebody who is honest 99% of the time more than somebody who is honest 90% of the time. (100% honesty can be considered an unrealistic goal, like 100% health, or being “perfectly reasonable.”)

Naturally, I would prefer to be with someone who is as honest as possible, but I will likely have to “settle” for the most honest person that I can find. The fact that I am willing to compromise my standards with regards to honesty – partly borne of a reasonable humility regarding my own capacity for honesty – does not mean that I will value a liar. If I am a mathematician, some of my proofs will doubtless fail – but that does not mean that failing to achieve perfect consistency is exactly the same as starting out to commit a fraud.

Love as a Response

If I stand in front of a mirror weighing 300 pounds and smoking my 40^th cigarette of the morning and say “I am healthy,” have I affected my health in any objective manner?

Of course not. I have merely chosen to say the words “I am healthy” rather than achieve actual health through consistent actions.

My words have not affected reality at all. I have merely put the cart before the horse. If I lose weight and quit smoking, I can reasonably stand in front of the mirror and say “I am healthy” (or at least “I am healthier”). My words thus become an accurate identification of an objective state – a state which has preceded my words and in a sense provokes them.

My words are thus a response to my empirical behaviour, measured in objective terms (weight loss, smoking cessation).

Similarly, if I stand in front of you and say “I love you,” this statement only has validity if it is a response to your behaviour. I can stand in front of the most evil and hateful human being on the planet and also say the words “I love you,” but my preference does not make that person any more lovable – any more than telling myself that I am healthy unclogs my arteries.

As I talked about in my book “On Truth,” people in general prefer – or find it far easier in the short term – to do whatever they please in the moment, and then redefine their actions as “universally virtuous.”

It is equally true that people in general prefer – or find it far easier in the short run – to date whomever they desire, and then redefine their partner as “lovable.”

Ask most young women what they are looking for in a man and you will hear various variations on the theme of tall, dark and handsome – or, if they are slightly younger, “cute and funny.”

I have asked this question of many people, and I have never heard the word “virtue” mentioned once.

Love and Virtue

Does love have anything to do with virtue?

Yes, yes and yes!

Love and Honesty

It is impossible to imagine genuine love in the absence of honesty. For love to be genuine, it must be an accurate assessment of particular traits within another human being. If the person that we claim to “love” constantly lies to us or falsifies his actions, then whatever perception we have of that person that causes us to love him are incorrect.

Since that which causes us to love is incorrect, our “love” must thus be invalid.

To analogize this, imagine that you work for me and I pay you in cash. However, when you try to spend your earnings, you discover that I have paid you with counterfeit bills. As a result, I have received value through your work, but you have not received value through my payment. My dishonesty has thus generated a false value for you, because if you knew that I was going to pay you with counterfeit money, you would not have worked for me to begin with.

Since the truth would have produced an opposite action in you – a rejection of employment, rather than an acceptance of it – your diligent behaviour was as unjustified as your interpretation of my honesty.

In the same way, if I tell you that I am courageous, and virtuous, yet hide sordid aspects of my life from you, drink in secret and so on – and you believe me – then you will feel more positive towards me than if I told you the truth.

Since our emotions are so directly dependent upon our perceptions and are so foundational to our experience of the world, someone who lies to us is fundamentally manipulating our experience of the world.

Since our emotions also alter our bodies biochemically, a liar who gets close to us manipulates our biochemistry as surely as if he were drugging us directly.

Thus our own emotional stability, which is a key part of a peaceful and happy life, requires as a bare minimum general honesty from those around us.

Love and Courage

Fundamentally, courage is not bravery with regards to another human being, but rather with regards to moral ideals.

My wife, though wonderfully courageous in many areas, has a certain weakness when it comes to social gatherings.

For instance, she has an ex-friend who is involved in a highly dysfunctional relationship. Recently, when we were at a party, we were told that this woman had gotten married to her boyfriend. Christina exclaimed: “Oh, that’s great!”

I was somewhat surprised, to say the least, and really put my foot in it by saying to her in front of everyone: “Really? I didn’t think you were such a big fan of their relationship.”

(It’s always good to have something to talk about during the drive home.)

Of course, I was not particularly concerned with Christina’s disavowal of her true feelings in company – particularly since the woman in question showed up at the party later on. I was more concerned with the fact that she placed the perceptions of others above the truth of her own feelings – feelings which were accurate and valid. I was most concerned, however, with the fact that she did not seem conscious of her reversal of values. If she had expressed approval with her friend standing right behind her, I would have understood her caution – however, there was no compelling and immediate reason to express approval of something she did not in fact approve of.

The reason that this troubled me, of course, was that I really didn’t like the idea that Christina could betray her values – even in this minor manner – for the sake of the possible disapproval of the people we were talking to, who we see maybe once every year or two.

This also made me feel insecure, since Christina and I both hold trusting our own feelings as a high value – as well as honesty of course. I really disliked the idea that the virtues we believed in and practiced were sort of a “private world” that had nothing to do with the “real world” of everyone else.

You know that feeling you get if you are dating a woman who never wants to introduce you to her friends? You get this uneasy sensation that you are kind of “below the radar,” or something to be hidden relative to her life as a whole. You are, in fact, a sort of embarrassment, in that she obviously feels that she must be “slumming” in some manner. If she felt that you would enhance her status with her friends, she would drag you to see them against your will if she had to.

When I was 17, I worked in a day-care centre teaching a room full of kids. I became friends with a woman who was slightly older, and was just going through a divorce. Over dinner one evening, she told me about her psychic abilities. Because I was 17, my hormones and I listened attentively.

Over a departmental lunch the next day, I mentioned her psychic abilities as part of a more general conversation. She became completely red-faced, and chastised me afterwards for bringing that up.

So many of us have this kind of “private world” that we openly disavow, scorn and reject when we are in the company of others. This is a form of cowardice, since we abandon what is precious to us for fear of the disapproval or rejection of others.

In other words, we reject ourselves rather than be rejected by others.

This avoids the pain of humiliation, but also keeps us trapped in an underworld of people we know will humiliate us if we are honest.

The reason that this habit is so hard to respect or love is because it involves so many contradictions.

If a certain belief or habit is truly valuable, it does not lose its value in the presence of others. Real money does not lose its value in the presence of counterfeit currency – quite the opposite is true in fact.

Conversely, if the opinions of others is the best methodology for determining our values, then those values cannot exist except through the opinions of others – thus there should be nothing to hide in the presence of others, since no values have been accepted or practised without their prior approval.

It is hard to respect someone who wants to “have his cake and eat it too” by holding private virtues that he consistently disavows in public. We tend to shy away from these sorts of people not only because of their hypocrisy, but also because these sorts of contradictory values make raising children enormously difficult.

If you ask a woman to evaluate a particular situation and she openly says, “Oh, I have no idea, I’ll have to check with all my friends,” then there is no possibility of equality in her relationship with her friends. If all her friends hold the same values, then they will be empty echoes of endless cross-referencing, with no ideas or opinions being generated at all.

At least one of her friends must be able to generate opinions, which everyone else then references.

Thus she both prefers and dislikes opinions – she dislikes having her own for fear of disapproval, and so she must prefer that other people create her opinions for her.

Of course, you never do meet people who openly tell you that they have no opinions, but must always ask their friends – and that is why these cowardly evasions are so odious. People always claim that their opinions are both virtuous and true, that they have integrity and are willing to stand up for what they believe in, and then they generally fold at the slightest sign of pressure or disapproval.

The fact that they fold – as we all do at times – does not warn them that they are not actually living their values, and must more closely examine their companions. Since everyone has a general access to the self-medicating madness of instant mythology, all that people do when they act in a cowardly manner is redefine their actions as virtuous in some manner.

Thus a woman may say: “I know that I said that, but I didn’t want to offend people (I’m nice), and besides, people don’t change (I’m practical), and we were enjoying their hospitality (I’m not ungrateful), and the person in question was going to show up (I’m prudent) – and besides, yesterday you said X, Y and Z (you’re hypocritical).”

This is why a lack of integrity tends to make us uneasy – because it always ends up being an attack on truth in general and our integrity in particular.

Not too relaxing…

Love and Sustainability

We do not call a tire “good” if it ruptures right after being installed. “Quality” has a lot to do with sustainability. A bridge is not of high quality if it collapses six minutes after being built.

In many ways, virtue is fundamentally about sustainable behaviour. Clearly, lying is not very sustainable behaviour – particularly in a long-term relationship – because reality is always opposing the words of the liar. As “intimacy” grows in a relationship and more and more people get involved in the couple’s interactions, lies become less and less sustainable.

Similarly, cowardice is also unsustainable in a relationship, since cowardice is always supported by justifications (lies) which reframe cowardice as “courage.” This creates an unstable situation where cowardly behaviour is both condemned and praised, resulting in highly inconsistent behaviour.

Integrity, of course, is all about sustainable behaviour – its opposite, conformity, is all about seeking the approval of others, which produces highly inconsistent behaviour. People inflict a need for conformity on us as children by attacking us for independent thought and evaluation, because any such thought reveals their hypocrisy. Thus conformist habits always stem from the desire of those who hold power over us to blind us to their inconsistent and hypocritical actions. This is why conformity and integrity are so fundamentally opposed.

If we love certain characteristics or virtues, then clearly our love will stabilize and increase to the degree to which those characteristics or virtues are stable, and increase.

Love and Security

Security is an essential ingredient for intimacy. Security results from a feeling of predictability and safety, which in turn arises from consistent benevolence on the part of others. If we are randomly attacked by our lover, we can never feel safe or secure. If we have to use a rickety old footbridge to cross a chasm, each wobbly step will be a fearful nightmare.

Why do we stay in relationships where we do not feel safe and secure? One central reason is that we have a habit of listening to people’s words, rather than regarding their actions. The old adage “actions speak louder than words” has fallen out of favour in our modern age, but it is essential for evaluating potential relationships of any kind.

Abusive behaviour always results from a lack of integrity.

If, on a first date, a woman tells you openly that she will attack you whenever she feels insecure, angry or vulnerable – and promises to blame you when you get upset about being attacked – you would be very unlikely to continue dating her.

No, people always tell you that they are acting virtuously, even if their actions completely contradict their stated values. If a woman has a habit of attacking others when she feels anxious, that behaviour can only be maintained if she redefines her abuse as virtuous in some manner. She will say that she is only defending herself, or that she has been patient for a long time but “enough is enough,” or that the other party started the conflict, and so on.

If her culpability can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, she then reverts to the secondary defence of abusers, which is to say that it is ignoble to point fingers and play “the blame game,” that “forgiveness is a virtue,” and “we need to move on now.”

In other words, she will openly state that unjustly attacking others is wrong, and then will unjustly attack others.

This lack of integrity ensures that no one around her will ever feel a consistent sense of security or safety. (In fact, that is exactly what it is designed to do, since destabilizing people is an essential prerequisite for controlling them.)

Security and Values

If we accept that integrity to virtue creates security – and that security is a necessary prerequisite for love – then we can understand why it is so important to have values in a relationship that both parties can refer to.

If an agreement can be reached that raised voices and name-calling are inappropriate to a loving relationship, then if one person yells or name-calls, the other person can object to that behaviour based on values that both parties have accepted.

It is impossible to have security – or integrity – without shared and objective values.

If I hand you $1,000 and think it is a loan, but you see it as a gift, then I will not perceive you to be acting with integrity if you never pay the “loan” back – just as you will never perceive me to be acting with integrity if I demand my “gift” back.

Similarly, if a woman holds “keeping others happy” as a core “value,” then she will view any emotional confrontation or uncomfortable honesty as “rude.”

On the other hand, if she holds “honesty” as a core value, then she will view a consistent avoidance of necessary confrontations or honesty as “cowardice.”

If a man believes that verbal abuse is “assertiveness,” then asking him to refrain from verbal abuse is the same as asking him to be a coward – which will never happen, since few if any people will ever voluntarily pursue an action they define as immoral or ignoble.

If a woman believes that nagging is necessary to get what she wants, then asking her to give up nagging would be like asking her to give up having any needs or preferences, which will never happen.

Following our above methodology, when considering integrity, we must next ask: “Integrity to what?”

Objective Integrity

Having integrity is acting in accordance with rational values. This is an enormously hard thing to achieve, both because most of the “values” we were given – or rather which were inflicted upon us – are so ridiculously self-contradictory, and also because living with integrity actively eliminates a goodly number of people from your life.

Women often say that they dislike nagging, but don’t know any other way to get their needs met.

This is a prime example of not living with integrity.

If my wife has to nag me to meet her needs, then she is basically telling me that I do not care about her, and that I will never lift a finger to meet her needs unless she constantly complains that I am not meeting her needs.

In the movie “The Breakup,” Jennifer Aniston tells Vince Vaughn that she wants him to want to do the dishes with her.

What she means by this is that she wants him to want to help her, to make the job of entertaining easier, and to place her needs above his own, at least temporarily.

The reason that this kind of behaviour is so corrupt is that it is so fundamentally self-contradictory.

If Jennifer has to constantly nag Vince to meet her needs, then clearly she believes that he does not voluntarily want to meet her needs in the first place. He does not respect what she wants, or does not care that she wants it – either way, he is treating her entirely disrespectfully.

She feels frustrated because she does not feel visible to him – as women so often say: “If he only knew how important this was to me, he would not hesitate to provide it.” Thus Jennifer gets stuck in a “broken record” loop of attempting to become visible to Vince, so that he will give her what she wants.

Fundamentally, then, she is nagging him because she feels invisible to him – because she feels that he is rejecting who she really is.

This is entirely hypocritical.

Obviously, what Vince wants is to not be nagged. Over and over, he complains that she keeps nagging him. He also does not seem to enjoy entertaining – and Jennifer’s obsessive perfectionism appears particularly odious to him.

It is thus ridiculous for Jennifer to chastise him for not meeting her needs, when by that very chastisement she is failing to meet his need, which is to not be chastised.

The tragic irony is that Jennifer feels rejected, and so rejects the man that she chose because he is rejecting her.

This is exactly like saying: “I need a form of transportation,” then spending years testing various makes of cars and researching all the alternatives, and then finally purchasing a car – and then, when you get it home, standing in front of it and exclaiming: “Excellent, now I’m going to turn this thing into a boat!”

Men always resist being turned into “boats” – while women experience men’s resistance at being transformed into something they are not as a rejection of themselves. They will openly say to a man they have chosen: “Change!” and then feel genuinely rejected when he does not change.

Of course, asking someone to change is rejecting him, at least as he is. To choose a man, and then reject a man, and then complain that you feel rejected, is quite mad.

If the innocent car in the woman’s garage could speak, surely it would say: “If you wanted a boat, why on earth did you buy a car?”

Why did you choose me if you don’t even like me?

The reason that couples so strenuously avoid this elemental conversation is that if you have bought a car when you really want a boat, the point is not to nag the car into becoming a boat, but to take the car back and get a boat instead.

You cannot claim to love someone, and then want him to change.

If you’re looking for a painting and spend years finding just the right one, you don’t then bring it home and start painting over it – particularly if you’re not even a painter!

Clearly, since no one is forcing you to go looking for a painting, you should just buy the right painting and be content with what you have.

If you are not a mental health professional or a well-versed philosopher, then when you try to change people, you are like someone who has no idea how to paint attempting to “improve” a painting.

If you are a mental health professional or a philosopher, then you are wise enough to know that people do not change, and so you will never buy a painting that you have to “paint over.”

Most economists accept that any attempt by a coercive monopoly such as the state to interfere with the natural flow of voluntary trade will create ever-growing distortions in the marketplace.

In the same way, any attempt to interfere with a person’s natural personality through any kind of aggression or rejection will create ever-growing distortions in his character. Nagging, for example, leads to an excess of fear, irritation and passive aggression, which in turn leads to increased nagging…

“Fixing” the Painting…

If we attempt to “correct” a painting because just a small part of it is “wrong,” we will inexpertly daub a blob of paint and then stand back to review our handiwork.

Naturally, because we lack knowledge and skill, we will have inevitably made the painting less pleasing than it was before.

Logically, we should then sigh and say: “Well, since I am obviously not a painter, I will now stop trying to ‘fix’ this painting – and the fact that I have now made the painting less attractive will serve as my perpetual warning about trying to ‘fix’ paintings again in the future.”

Surely, if the painting were sentient, we should also apologize to it for making it uglier.

Ahh, if only we were that logical!

Sadly, what people actually do is continue to try and “fix” the painting, making it uglier and uglier, and less and less suited to their purposes.

As things get worse and worse they get more and more angry, and throw more and more paint at the painting, and get more and more frustrated, and blame the painting, and blame the paint, and blame the paintbrush – everything but themselves!

And we all know where that leads in the end.

At some point, they stand back from the painting – now completely unrecognizable from what they originally bought – which lies buried and unrecoverable under mountains of ugly and clashing colors.

They stare at that mess and say to themselves: “I really can’t believe that I ever liked this painting – it is the ugliest thing I have ever seen, and I’m going to throw it out!”

Then, they go shopping for a new painting that they can take home and “improve,” and the whole cycle begins again.

The final tragedy is that if people genuinely accepted that they cannot “improve” a painting, they would be far more careful about the paintings they bought, and would not accept imperfections or ugliness, knowing that they cannot improve it after they get it home.

In other words, the final ugliness of the painting is actually brought about by believing that the painting can be made less ugly.

Without the fantasy that a painting can be made more beautiful, true beauty could in fact be achieved.

The belief that we can reshape the personalities of other people creates a deep and inescapable polarization within a relationship, which is captured for comic effect in the statement: “I love you, you’re perfect, now change!”

But – we can’t change people at all?

In our minds, we all generally know the basic principle that we cannot change others – but this does not seem to fit with the reality that we expect to improve within a relationship.

If two human beings do not change at all in proximity to each other, then what is the point of a relationship? When we go to university, we have a relationship of sorts with our professors, and we expect to change based on that relationship. We expect to grow in knowledge and wisdom, or technical skill, or mental agility, based on having them as professors.

In the same way, if we sign up at a dojo to learn jujitsu, we expect to change – to improve – based on our relationship with our instructor.

If love is our involuntary response to virtue, then if a relationship results in an increase in virtue, then surely it will result in an increase in love – something to be ardently desired, it would seem.

How can this seeming paradox be resolved – that we must not strive to change people, but that the best relationships result in improvements for both participants?

Let us return to our painting metaphor to see if we cannot unravel this knot.

Imagine that you and I are not consumers of art, but creators of art.

Both our paintings are accepted by a gallery, and when we show up to have a look at them, we are immediately drawn to the beauty of each other’s work.

While conversing with each other, we find that we have very similar goals as artists – to ennoble people by drawing their attention to the beauty of the world they live in.

As reasonable artists, we know that objective feedback on our own work will help us achieve our goals. Thus the next time I am working on a painting, I call you when I am halfway through and ask you to have a look and let me know what you think.

You arrive, look over my painting with great attention, ask me what it is that I am trying to achieve, and then give me objective and valuable feedback on how to shape the light, colour and composition to more completely achieve my objective.

This process goes back and forth for several months – and then, since our mutual feedback is truly helping us achieve our artistic goals, and bringing us even greater joy as artists, we decide to rent a studio together and paint in the same room.

As we work together, our paintings become more and more beautiful and our trust in our own and each other’s artistic judgment grows. I learn from your feedback and you learn from mine – we internalize the principles that we provide each other, and then as we improve, we help each other surmount the new obstacles that always arise from increased excellence.

We have our disagreements, of course – but sometimes it seems that we learn even more from our disagreements! Our conflicts are resolved patiently, positively and productively, thus affirming the strength of our relationship and allowing our mutual trust to grow even stronger.

We can all understand that this kind of relationship is mutually beneficial, and results in great improvements in both skill and joy for both parties.

How is this different from a desire to change someone?

Well, the difference is that we are both helping each other achieve noble goals that we arrived at the relationship already committed to pursuing.

I am not trying to turn you from a plumber into a painter, and you are not trying to turn me from a painter into an accountant. If you want to paint beautiful portraits, I am not trying to turn you into Jackson Pollock. If you enjoy dribbling paint in semi-random patterns, I am not trying to turn you into Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. If you want to make a living as a painter, I do not try to downgrade your ambitions and turn you into a hobbyist.

The difference is that I am not setting your goals – which really means, in essence, that I am not attempting to alter your values, but rather help you achieve them.

In the above example of the conflict between Jennifer and Vince, we can see that Jennifer’s fundamental error – the mistake that makes the relationship inevitably doomed – is that she is attempting to alter his values.

“I want you to want to help me do the dishes!” she exclaims in frustration – thus revealing that what she really wants is for his values to be the opposite of what they are. Clearly, he doesn’t want to help her do the dishes – what she demands from him is the complete opposite of that existing desire.

This would be like me approaching you as you regard your painting in an art gallery, and attempting to turn you into the opposite of a painter.

We can surely picture the absurdity of an Olympic coach marching up to some overweight chain-smoking stranger lounging on a park bench and snarling at him to become more motivated, dammit, to get his ass off that park bench and start taking his training seriously!

The smoker would doubtless stare up in bewilderment, wondering what on earth could motivate someone to march up to him out of nowhere, and expect him to act in complete opposition to his clearly-expressed existing preferences.

On the other hand, if I desperately want to win an Olympic medal, and I have the ability and drive to train and diet endlessly, then a coach is essential to help me achieve my goal.

In the first example, the coach is not attempting to facilitate the goals of the chain-smoking stranger, but rather to set his goals in direct opposition to all available evidence! (Also known as: imposing your own goals on others.)

In the second example, the coach is not attempting to set goals for the motivated athlete, but rather facilitate the achievement of those goals in accordance with all available evidence.

When we treat people as objects to be fixed – like paintings we can paint over – it is not about them, but about us. When we attempt to “correct” a painting, we are fundamentally the only person in the room.

When we treat people not as objects, but as complementary souls – not as paintings, but painters – we can truly merge our lives in trust, love and beauty, because there are in fact two people in the room.

This is the difference between changing people and helping people.

This is the difference between control and love.

In relationships, this is the difference between dismal failure and joyous success.

Acceptance and Rejection

Acceptance is the opposite of rejection. It is logically impossible to both accept and reject something at the same time, just as it is impossible for a rock to fall both up and down at the same time.

Why, then, are we so drawn to attempt to “improve” the people that we claim to love?

Well, because it is far less uncomfortable to attempt to improve others than to actually improve ourselves.

How can we justify the fundamental contradiction that we both love someone and want her to change in significant ways?

The first thing to understand is that we don’t actually want to change someone else.

This may sound startling, but it is easily provable.

If I spend years shopping for a home, and then finally buy a small condominium, and then demand that, in order to complete the sale, the condo must be converted into a four bedroom house, my real estate agent would regard me as largely insane.

“If you want a four bedroom house, then you should shop for a four bedroom house!” she would say – and quite rightly too!

If I buy the condominium, and move in, and then constantly complain to everyone that my condominium is not a four bedroom house, then clearly I have bought the condominium not because I want a four bedroom house, but rather because I want to complain about not having a four bedroom house.

This is a very important distinction, which Edward Albee writes about in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” George and Martha have a demonically abusive marriage, and George complains about it endlessly, until Martha finally screams at him that he married her in order to be abused.

Why on earth would somebody enter into a relationship in order to complain about that relationship?

It does seem rather counterintuitive, but it makes sense logically when you look at the root causes.

Reversing Virtue and Vice

If I act in a cowardly manner, but I redefine my cowardice as “courage,” then I am turning morality completely upside down by converting a vice into a “virtue.”

If I am a doctor, and redefine “cancer” as “health” (and vice versa), then everything that I do will be the opposite of good medicine. I will inject cancer cells into healthy people, tell them to smoke and refrain from using sunscreen, and I will attempt to hasten the progress of cancer in sick people.

By redefining that which is unhealthy as that which is healthy, I have reversed the cause and effect in everything I do.

I have in fact become a kind of cancer.

In the same way, if I redefine my cowardice as a virtue – a cowardly action in and of itself – then I reverse the cause and effect of all my relationships.

Let us say that I fear my parents because they are abusive, either overtly or covertly.

It is not cowardice to openly admit that I am afraid of my parents.

It is also not cowardice to submit to my parents’ will as long as I openly admit my fear. If they want me to come to dinner and I go, I am not necessarily a coward.

How can that be possible – to submit to bullying without being cowardly?

Virtue and Honesty

The first prerequisite for virtue is honesty. With honesty comes at least the possibility of integrity, which can survive a temporary surrender to bullying, just as your liver can survive a glass of wine or two.

If I openly say to my wife: “We must go to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner, although I hate and fear them, because I am too afraid to either confront or avoid them,” then my wife has at least an accurate understanding of the reality of the situation.

She clearly understands that my true desire is not to go to my parents’ house, and that my barrier is my fear of my parents.

Armed with that knowledge, my wife can then help me to get what I really want by talking me through the fear that blocks me from achieving it.

This is analogous to one painter helping another painter overcome his fear of submitting his work to a gallery – something that he desperately and openly desires.

On the other hand, if I claim that I “love” my parents when I really hate and fear them, then an inevitable and terrible sequence of events is set into motion.

Virtue and Obedience

If I say that I love my parents, then I must define obedience to their wishes as obedience to virtue.

This may sound confusing, so let us look at it in a little more detail.

If I say that I completely respect my doctor, then obedience to his instructions is obedience to the objective principles of health. If I say that I completely trust my financial advisor, then obedience to his wishes is obedience to sound principles of financial management.

In the same way, if I say that I love my parents, then they must be good and virtuous people, and so naturally it follows that they must also love me – since if I were not a good person, I would not be able to love them for their virtue.

If we love each other, then obviously we take pleasure in each other’s company and have each other’s best interests at heart, and contact can only enhance the pleasure, integrity and virtue of our lives.

If I trust my doctor, and contact with my doctor always enhances my health, then anyone who tells me to avoid my doctor must ipso facto have the goal of harming my health. If my financial advisor is always right, then only a corrupt con man would tell me to fire my financial advisor.

Thus if I reframe my fear and hatred of my parents as “love,” anyone who tells me to avoid my parents must be an evil person who only wishes me harm.

Do you see the horrors that we set in motion when we lie about virtue?

Since obedience to my parents’ wishes is also obedience to “virtue,” when my parents ask me to come over for an intermittent Sunday dinner, refusing to attend is the equivalent of refusing to be virtuous – in fact, committing a moral crime.

This reversal of values creates endless catastrophes in our relationships.

If we have redefined our cowardice as a virtue, then we will inevitably perceive certain traits in those around us as dangerous and negative.

If I my stockbroker is corrupt and is busily robbing me blind, then any competent stockbroker who comes across me will see that immediately, and say:

“This stockbroker that you think is very good is actually corrupt, and is violating most if not all professional ethics, and is taking you to the cleaners, and will leave you penniless. For instance, the degree of ‘churning’ that he is performing on your account is utterly unsustainable – you would require returns of 20-30% to break even, given the commissions he is generating for himself by buying and selling stocks in your account…”

This competent stockbroker would then give you objective reasons as to why you should no longer trust your existing stockbroker, but rather fire him immediately.

Naturally, if you have defined obedience to your corrupt stockbroker as obedience to financial responsibility, having this obedience revealed as conformity to financial irresponsibility would create enormous anxiety within you.

If you claim that you want to be healthy – and genuinely do want to be healthy – and you take up chain-smoking as a result of the advice of a corrupt doctor, hearing your doctor debunked will make you very upset.

Realizing that we have conned ourselves puts us in a state of excruciating vulnerability, since it reveals so much about our own family histories, and how we were exploited and rendered “easy prey” by our parents.

Some people, of course, are able to handle this upset if they are in fact dedicated to being healthy. They will survive their own shame, humiliation and anxiety, fire their corrupt doctor, and reform their habits.

However, the majority of people will simply shoot the messenger.

Clearly, people who redefine their vices as virtues have already demonstrated their preference for avoiding their own anxiety by making up stories.

Since the best predictor of future behaviour is relevant past behaviour, what do you think that these people’s response will be to a situation that increases their anxiety?

Why, they’re just going to make up another angry story to “explain away” their “mistake.”

The Inevitable Counterattack…

Health is not a moral attribute, and so the preceding medical analogies are far less emotionally charged than the reality of redefining vices as virtues.

If my parents are corrupt or evil, then obedience to their wishes is obedience to corruption or evil.

In essence, if I obey corrupt or evil principles, I am in fact corrupt or evil.

Nothing is more emotionally volatile than labeling someone “corrupt” or “evil.”

“Evil” is obedience to evil principles or evil people.

“Corruption” is redefining that evil as “the good.”

No sane human being can look in the mirror and say: “I am evil.” Even a monster such as Hitler portrayed himself to himself as the saviour of Germany, the liberator of the Aryan race, and so on.

The moment that a human being looks in the mirror and says, “I am evil,” he must change.

This is a central reason why people would rather redefine “evil” as “the good” – since if they cannot, they are revealed as evil and must immediately start to change.

Thus if I invert rational values and redefine my cowardice as courage, I must inevitably banish everyone from my life who has even a hint of the following characteristics:

• Genuine courage
• Moral perceptiveness
• Integrity
• Honesty
• Empathy
• A true capacity to love
• Curiosity
• …and so on.

Counterfeiting Virtue

If I am a counterfeiter, I need to keep people away from me who can easily detect false currency. If I am a drug dealer, I am unlikely to befriend “drug enforcement” agents. If I am a liar, people with a strong ability to detect falsehoods – and the courage to confront liars – will be anathema to me. If I am a con man, I must prey upon the weak and gullible. Strong and perceptive souls will always be safe from me, since I will avoid them like the plague.

In the same way, when I pervert rational values by redefining my vices as virtues, I am inevitably drawn to reject and revile strong and virtuous people – and inevitably drawn towards weak and corrupt people who will not challenge my own corruption.

In other words, reversing virtue reverses love. Instead of being drawn towards virtue for the sake of happiness, you are drawn towards vice for the sake of avoiding pain.

Claiming that you are virtuous when you are not inevitably draws you to “love” people who are unlovable.

If you “love” yourself for your vices, you will inevitably be drawn to “love” others for their vices – and, as inevitably, to hate and fear other people for their virtues, just as you hate and fear true virtue in yourself.

Polarization

In this way, we are drawn to bond with people that we fundamentally dislike. We are drawn to them by the inescapable logic of our own premises – however, the hypocritical falsehoods of those premises also causes us to recoil from those we desire.

This form of attachment is basically a kind of self-destructive addiction rather than any form of benevolent love. A man who has redefined his vices as virtues has the same relationship with those that he claims to “love” that a heroin addict has to his heroin in the later stages of his addiction. He needs it because it relieves his anxiety, but he hates it because it is destroying his life.

In the same way, my partner is a mirror of myself – her virtues are my virtues, her vices are my vices.

Her capacity for honesty is my capacity for honesty.

Her integrity is my integrity.

To take a minor example of how this looks in practice, imagine a woman who has gained a few pounds struggling into her clothing, which has just returned from the dry cleaners. A mature person will first go and weigh herself, to see if she has gained any weight. An immature person will blame the dry cleaners for shrinking her clothing, or, if she finds out that she has gained weight, will blame her boyfriend for buying potato chips, or not telling her that she has gained weight, or society as a whole for “demanding” that women remain thin.

Projection

Of course, if I know that I am a coward but redefine my cowardice as “courage,” I do not eliminate my knowledge of my cowardice. If I am fat and redefine fat as “healthy,” I do not eliminate my knowledge of my obesity. If I steal a car, I do not suddenly believe that I actually bought it.

How, then, can I evade or ignore my knowledge of my own cowardice?

Well, the most common mechanism is a devilish psychological defence called “projection.”

Projection is the habit of ascribing our own negative qualities to other people.

The most common example of this is passive aggression.

Let us return to our troubled couple, Sheila and Bruce.

If Bruce is frustrated but does not, cannot or will not openly express his frustration, then he will begin to cause problems for other people: either through tangential complaints, snappy comments, stony silence, or surly stomping.

Sheila will then ask him: “What’s wrong?”

Naturally, Bruce will reply: “Nothing!”

Of course, Sheila knows that this is not the case, and will ask him again. Again and again, Bruce will deny that anything is wrong, thus causing her intense frustration.

It is in this manner that the frustration passes from Bruce to Sheila.

As Sheila becomes increasingly frustrated by Bruce’s provocation and subsequent stonewalling, Bruce begins to express increasing exasperation towards her.

He claims to be irritated by her persistent questioning – which allows him to unload his original frustration, but blame it on her actions instead of his own thinking.

Zooming Out…

To a far greater degree, we can see the same mechanism at work in the realm of geopolitics.

Let us take a little spin back to 2001.

George Bush wants to invade Iraq, but he cannot openly express that he wants to invade Iraq – so he must make up reasons that place the ownership for his decision squarely on the shoulders of Saddam Hussein. Thus he can “legitimately” turn from an initiator to a reactor, from an aggressor to a leader acting in “self-defence.”

Thus he continually repeats the mantra that Saddam Hussein is an aggressor who wants to attack the United States – thus “legitimizing” his own aggression, which is the true source of the conflict.

In the same way, our parents will often tell us that we are “selfish” for not wanting to drop by for another boring or unsettling Sunday dinner. “You are selfish,” they will say, “because you are ignoring the feelings and needs of other people, and only thinking of what you want!”

However, it is clear that they are failing their own definition of “virtue” by ignoring our desire not to attend Sunday dinner, and only thinking of what they want. They selfishly want us to be there despite the fact that it goes against our desires – but then they get angry at us for not wanting to be there because it goes against their desires.

Madness!

Thus we can see that projection is a mechanism for self-avoidance, or for actively rejecting knowledge of our own motivations.

If we are angry at our wife, but provoke her into anger instead of expressing our own anger and then release our anger based on the fact that she is angry, all that we have done is set an elaborate trap which allows us to abusively “release” our feelings without ever learning their cause.

Of course, the reason that we do not want to learn the cause of our actions is that we know deep down that our actions are unjustified – and most likely cravenly aggressive.

If I buy a stereo from a guy in a van, I will be reluctant to ask for a receipt, since I will want to avoid the knowledge that it is stolen. It is not the receipt that I am avoiding, but rather the knowledge that I am profiting from crime, and thus enabling criminals.

Changing Others

It would almost seem that, as a species, we are utterly addicted to changing others’ behaviour rather than examining our own.

There is something so elementally seductive about playing the “know it all” card and lecturing others on their deficiencies. When problems arise, for all too many people this is the default position.

If they have a near-miss in a car, their first impulse is to blame other drivers.

If they become irritated with someone, their starting position is always that the other person’s deficiencies are causing that irritation. If their children misbehave or develop bad habits, it is always the selfishness of the child, the influence of the peer group, or the tyranny of the media that is to blame.

Why is it that we are so drawn to blaming others and inevitably and endlessly attempting to correct them, rather than examining our own motives and ideas for the causes of our problems?

The obvious answer is that we prefer the short-term gain of self-righteousness to the long-term gain of actual growth and improvement in our habits – yet that does not explain very much, since we diet, exercise, go to work and see our dentists, and do all other sorts of things which sacrifice short-term gains for long-term gains.

Thus we can see that human beings certainly do have the capacity to defer immediate gratification for the sake of long-term advantage. Why is this so rarely the case in one of the most important aspects of our lives – our personal relationships?

Why We Succumb…

First of all, other people can be manipulated in a way that, say, our teeth cannot. We can convince another person that he alone is to blame for the problems in our relationship, but we cannot “convince” a tooth that it is not infected when it is. We can bully another person into believing that he is responsible for our overeating; we cannot bully the fat off our bellies.

Secondly, the general lack of integrity in those around us positively enables the kind of “blame game” that goes on in relationships. People who are raised badly, who end up with weak wills, weak characters and manipulative habits, can be easily blamed and controlled.

If we could only achieve the kind of integrity that, say, a tooth has, we would do an enormous service to the mental health and happiness of the world.

Enabling and the Vengeance of the Slave

Allowing other people to treat us badly is a subtle form of aggression against them.

It arises from a fairly primitive time in our species, when slavery and hyper-control dominated our interactions.

If a slave hates his master – as deep down he surely does – but cannot retaliate against him in any violent or assertive manner, what are his options?

Well, when you want somebody dead, but you cannot kill him openly, your best option is to exacerbate his unhealthy habits.

In other words, a slave can eventually take vengeance on his master by continually bringing him a drink, sitting with him while he drinks, and endlessly offering to refill his glass.

On a psychological level, the slave can effectively re-create his own misery in the mind of his master by both provoking and submitting to bullying.

Every time the master beats the slave, the misery and self-loathing of the master increases. Every time the master screams at the slave, the soul of the master dies a little more. Every whip of the lash kills the master’s capacity for love, contentment and peace of mind.

This, of course, is Nietzsche’s “slave morality,” in which the slave takes a form of masochistic satisfaction and dark glee in the spiritual destruction of his master. The passive-aggressive “moral superiority” of the slave is the only satisfaction that such a beaten-down creature can hope for.

The problem, however, is that by continually pursuing the insidious satisfaction of passive-aggressive masochism, the slave often becomes dangerously addicted to this form of vengeance.

In other words, the slave becomes addicted to having a master and finds life without this form of underhanded revenge entirely lacking in stimulation and satisfaction.

It’s not entirely in the past…

Now, since most of us are raised as virtual slaves within our families and schools, it is all too common for us to become addicted to having masters – and thus attempting to “master” our rulers through self-pitying moral superiority and the enabling, or supporting, of self-destructive behaviours on the part of those who command us.

If left unexamined, this drive to destroy those who control us inevitably leads us to seek out those who will control us, and then endlessly attempt to destroy them.

As mentioned earlier, the weapon of the slave is “moral superiority,” or beatific self-righteousness. To really undo his master, the slave must set up a standard of “forgiveness,” and “unconditional love,” by which he tortures the infected conscience of his master.

The way that this paradigm translates itself into modern relationships – particularly romantic, but also parental – is that both parties intermittently take on the roles of master and slave, or persecutor and persecuted, or “unjust attacker” and “self-righteous victim.” Since their lives are based on attack, condemnation, self-righteous vengeance and frustrated control, they remain in a continual state of provocation, attack, withdrawal and moral pomposity, creating an endless closed loop of ever-increasing frustration, bitterness, fear and resentment.

On a more overt level, we can see this kind of interaction occurring in the typical cycle of an abusive marriage. Let’s be stereotypical and talk about the husband as the abuser.

Over a few weeks, Bruce becomes increasingly tense and snappy. In turn, Sheila responds to his growing aggression through provocation, either in the form of complete obsequience – which irritates him – or endless questions and nagging defiance, which inflames him. Bruce then asserts his dominance and releases his tension by attacking Sheila in a titanic blow-up either physical or verbal in nature.

However, since Bruce has asserted his dominance in such a hysterical and abusive manner, the power in the relationship now passes from Bruce to Sheila.

Since Bruce has acted so obviously unjustly, Sheila now gains control of the moral narrative of their relationship, and uses it to bully Bruce.

After his attack, she threatens to leave him. He comes crawling back, apologizing and begging for forgiveness – now playing the part of the slave instead of the master. Sheila withholds her “forgiveness,” enjoying the new power that she has over him, and abusing him in turn, both by torturing him morally and staying in the relationship.

When we disapprove of someone morally but remain in an intimate and supporting relationship with him, we are acting entirely immorally ourselves.

If I work for a corrupt boss, and am fully aware that he is stealing from his customers but continue to work for him, I am enabling his corruption as surely as if I were performing it myself. I may attempt to assuage my conscience by nagging at my boss to be a “better” man, or tentatively bringing up my “objections” in meetings, but as time goes on, and I do not quit, everyone understands that my nagging is just a ritual designed to enable me to continue to take money from a corrupt person or organization while continuing to pretend to myself that I am moral.

By continuing to work for this corrupt man – while professing my own devotion to moral principles – I am clearly communicating to him that morality is simply a tool for self-deception, and that ethical exhortation is merely self-medicating hypocrisy. This “enables” his corruption even more so than the customers he steals from, who would doubtless flee his predation if they discovered it.

Thus remaining in relationships with immoral people while complaining that they are immoral is one of the most subtle forms of abuse in the world. It is revoltingly hypocritical, insofar as it uses ethics to enable and justify corruption.

This is the difference between the mugger who steals from you because he wants to buy a drink, and the socialist who steals from you because she wants to “help the poor.”

When you look closely for this kind of interaction in the relationships of those around you – or your own relationships, for that matter – it becomes blindingly obvious and virtually omnipresent.

A man “persecutes” his wife for her lack of sexual desire, and then plays the victim when he is criticized for not helping around the house. When the woman is attacked for her lack of sexual interest, she responds with a passive aggressive “moral” argument: “I do not feel like having sex because you are not emotionally available, or we are not close enough, or you yelled at me yesterday, or I am worried about finances, or I am stressed out because I have too much housework, or you don’t help enough with the kids etc etc etc.”

If we break down the man’s moral argument, he is basically saying: “I agreed to pursue a monogamous relationship with you, giving up sex with all other women. This creates an implicit obligation on your part to have sex with me since you hold a monopoly on sexual interactions. By continually refusing to have sex with me, you are setting a terrible and unjust trap wherein I will be tempted to pursue an affair, which will result in my personal and financial destruction. Since you are using sex to punish and control me in our relationship, but I am not allowed to pursue sex outside of this relationship, you are putting me up against the wall, which is a most hateful and unloving thing to do.”

His wife, on the other hand, is saying something like: “I do not feel close to you, because you are not emotionally available, which is a failure of your duties as a husband. You also yelled at me yesterday, which is abusive, and also a failure on your part as a husband. I complain about finances because you do not make enough money. I’m stressed about housework because you do not help enough. The kids are driving me crazy because I always have to be the disciplinarian, while you get to be the ‘fun’ dad who just plays with them. Thus, you are cold, lazy, unambitious and abusive. In fact, asking for sex when you know that I feel this way is further evidence of your coldness and abusive tendencies!”

As we can see, if we look closely, what is really going on here is a not-too-subtle tug of war over the moral narrative of the relationship, which is essentially a revolving slave-to-master interaction.

Deep down, we all know that if we can get someone to admit that a certain behaviour is morally wrong, he can in no way continue to defend that behaviour, and must change.

As I have argued from the very beginning of my podcast series, morality is the most powerful tool in the arsenal of mankind.

Whoever controls “morality” controls the relationship.

We all understand this instinctively, and so continually use stories and mythologies to attempt to gain control of the moral narrative of a relationship.

The reason that we never fully succeed is that we are perpetually creating “rules” for our partner that we do not follow ourselves.

We are all perfectly aware of this kind of hypocrisy in others when we read about priests who molest children, anti-homosexual Congressman who solicit gay sex in bathroom stalls, or people like Oprah who continually talk about feminism and “woman power” while simultaneously presenting an endless cavalcade of fear-mongering stories about attacks on women. Dr. Phil is another example of this kind of phenomenon. He continually attacks those who use violence to resolve their problems while praising soldiers to the skies.

There are several common mythologies at work in romantic relationships, which we would be wise to learn by heart.

“You Lack Empathy “

The first and most common moral mythology – particularly for women – is the essential criticism: “You lack empathy.”

The criticism of “selfishness” is so common that it can be hard to hear after a while.

Many, many women truly believe that if their husbands were genuinely empathetic, their marriages would be enormously improved, and their needs would be met.

The simple truth of the fact, though, is that most people are happy to talk about what they think and feel if they meet with genuine acceptance and respect.

What women are really saying when they complain that their husbands “lack empathy” is that their husbands are not thinking and feeling what their wives want them to think and feel.

Let’s look at a common example.

The horror of chores…

A fairly constant complaint from women is that their husbands seem supernaturally resistant to initiating chores.

“Why oh why is it that I have to ask him a dozen times to take out the garbage? It’s not like garbage day magically changes from week to week! Why can he not get it through his head that I don’t want to have to manage him like some sort of mother? And if he’s not going to take outthe garbage, why doesn’t he just tell me so I can do it myself, instead of just continually promising that he’s going to do it ‘in a few minutes’?”

This is a clear example of “moral positioning.” Here is a translation of the subtext:

“You’re sooo not going to get laid!”

Or, alternatively:

“He does not respect my needs, he is not pulling his weight in this household, he is just manipulating me by appeasing me in the moment, while having no intention of doing what I ask. He is passive-aggressively frustrating me – he is selfish and lazy, and is turning me into a nag, so that I end up looking like the bad person when he’s the one who’s not doing his chores!”

On the surface, this seems like a seductively appealing narrative. Who could fail to sympathize with such a hard done by and put upon woman, struggling to maintain a household while her husband lazes and obfuscates on the couch?

Sadly, it is all pure nonsense.

By attempting to control his behaviour through nagging repetition, this woman is bypassing the most important question she needs to ask about why he is doing what he is doing (or not doing).

In other words, she claims that he is not being empathetic towards her needs, while at the same time she is not being at all empathetic towards his needs.

Clearly, by not taking out the garbage, he is communicating to her that he does not want to take out the garbage.

By making up a story that portrays him as lazy and negligent, his wife is creating a mythology about his motivation rather than honestly attempting to understand it.

This is not science or logic or empiricism or common sense or intimacy, but religion.

Remember, when bad things happen in the world of religion, “sinners” are invented to take the blame.

In this case, the “sinner” is laziness – or the husband in general.

We may as well say, when striving to understand the cause of an illness, “Satan made me sick!” Sure, it’s a comforting story with a protagonist and antagonist and a satisfyingly vindictive moral theme.

Sadly, it just has nothing to do with reality whatsoever.

If I am genuinely “lazy,” I may possess that trait for any one of a myriad number of reasons. I may be depressed or lonely, or feel over-controlled, or sense that my life is going in the wrong direction, or have any variety of medical deficiencies or ailments, or I may believe that my life lacks meaning and purpose, or I may be worried about possible moral transgressions on my part, or I may feel that I am embedded in a corrupt or compromising work environment, or my children may be going through a certain phase that reminds me of sad times in my own childhood, or I may be worried that I no longer love my wife…

There can be 10,000 or more reasons underlying my “lack of motivation.”

A wife who does not sit down with sensitivity and empathy to ask her husband why he is unmotivated is just a bully and has no moral right whatsoever to criticize her husband for his lack of sensitivity and empathy.

Nagging and Humiliation

She is also humiliating him in a way that can be hard to see.

If we are married to someone, we must certainly claim to love and respect him above all others. If we treat him, however, as if he is a “defective household chore robot,” then we are implicitly denigrating him in truly terrible ways.

When a wife marches up to her husband, demands that he take out the garbage, and implies that he is lazy and selfish, she is clearly communicating the following:

“I know that I promised to love and respect you for all eternity, but right now getting the garbage outside the house is infinitely more important to me than understanding your soul. In fact, I’m perfectly willing to attack your nature, ethics and initiative in order to get you to take the trash out. On my scale of values, moving the trash is an infinite plus. Understanding your soul is not even on my list!”

To see that your true personality and being is not even on the list of your wife’s priorities – and that you have been displaced by empty and trivial tasks – is unbearably humiliating.

If this humiliation were truly felt by all the spouses in the world, it would be like a neutron bomb in the world of marriage.

Marriages, like buildings, would be left standing – there would just be no people in them.

The Abuse of Assumptions

As I talked about in my book “On Truth,” morality is almost always used as a weapon of control and dominance.

When your wife marches up to you and demands in a shrill and exasperated tone for you to “PLEASE take out the garbage!” – implying that you are lazy and selfish – there are really only two possibilities.

You are in fact lazy and selfish..?

Naturally, if you are lazy and selfish – and we assume that these pejorative terms accurately represent the entire sum of your personality – then attacking you for being lazy and selfish after voluntarily choosing you as a life partner is patently ridiculous.

If my wife could have married any man with any accent in the world, but chose me, it would seem rather strange for her to attack me for having a British accent, claiming that every man with a British accent – who is not currently residing in England – is a pretentious phony.

If I am a pretentious phony, then it is quite silly for my wife to attack me for being a pretentious phony. If I am not a pretentious phony, then my wife would only use that abusive term to hurt me – and she would only be able to hurt me with it if I was not in fact a pretentious phony, or disliked pretentious phonies myself.

If I were a pretentious phony, then clearly I would have developed that personality trait because I lacked self-esteem, and so felt a need to portray myself as wiser or smarter than I actually was in order to gain the good approval of others. (In other words, as a self-defensive “initial strike” against potential attacks.)

Now, I would only have developed this low self-esteem and dependence upon the approval of others if I had been persistently attacked and condemned by my parents when I was a child.

If, when expressing my authentic opinions, I had been dismissed as an ignorant philistine, I would then be sorely tempted to manufacture more “sophisticated” opinions in order to avoid being attacked.

In other words, I would be “pretentious” as an adult because I had been verbally abused as a child.

It is, then, entirely abusive for my wife to verbally abuse me for traits that have resulted from a history of having been verbally abused.

If you are “lazy,” it is generally because you feel a significant disconnect between your choices, your actions, and the effect you can have on your environment.

In psychological studies, when chickens or rats are given random punishments and rewards, they tend to become inert, because they cannot create any sense of rational cause and effect between their choices, their actions and their environment.

Personal energy and initiative, in other words, generally arise from a feeling of efficacy.

Depressed or inert people feel that their “locus of control” resides somewhere outside themselves. A micromanaged child will not easily develop a sense of personal initiative since his entire being is dedicated towards satisfying the endless and contradictory demands of other people.

It’s tough to plan your future when you’re dodging bullets.

I knew a woman who, when making toast, had to suffer through her mother hovering over her and constantly correcting everything she was doing. She should have brushed the breadcrumbs off the bread before putting them into the toaster, the heat was on just a little bit too high, she should not turn away from the toaster while it was in operation, in case something caught fire – and when all was said and done, she did not clean the toaster nearly well enough!

The amount of stress involved in heating two slices of bread was ridiculous. This woman had virtually no chance to develop her own methodology of thinking, of testing cause and effect, of deciding for herself how even minor goals could be best achieved.

Inevitably, she found herself largely paralyzed in the realm of major life decisions, and tended to navigate from moment to moment, based on the approval or disapproval of those around her. She wanted to achieve great things with her career, but ended up working as a secretary despite a very good education, because she had simply not developed the capacity to identify and pursue goals on her own accord, and according to own judgment – and, of course, remained hypersensitive to criticism, which crippled her ability to negotiate, and so progress in any career.

Sadly, her paralysis also invited micromanagement from others. She would proclaim her desire to achieve a certain goal, but then would take no steps towards it, while continually complaining about the difficulties of achieving it. This would invite an endless stream of people into her life who would help her set up action plans, alternative approaches, proactive time management goals and so on.

I never did see anyone actually ask what she felt when she sat down to attempt to achieve her goals.

If that question had been asked, and an honest answer had been provided, real progress could have been made.

Unfortunately, by telling her how to achieve her goals, people were in fact stepping into the role of her mother, since when we tell people what to do, we automatically denigrate their existing abilities. If I met you on the street and explained to you in great detail how to put your left foot forward, and then your right foot forward in order to walk, you would scarcely feel elevated by my opinion of your existing ability to walk.

In the same way, when a wife denigrates her husband for failing to initiate and complete chores without instruction, she is actually abusing him, denigrating him, and re-creating exactly the same circumstances – and exactly the same abuse – that prompted his inertia to begin with.

And yet, if you listen to her surface story, you will likely walk away entirely convinced that she is the victim in the interaction with her husband.

On the other hand, if you are not lazy, but your wife tells you that you are, then clearly she is using the pejorative to manipulate you.

Keep your eyes peeled. Do not be fooled.

The War of Narrative

As mentioned earlier, most relationships are founded on a war of narratives in which competing mythologies jockey for the dominant position.

Love and Mythology

How many times in relationships do we have the following interaction:

• “Hey, that really hurt me, what you just said.”
• “I had no desire to hurt you, you must be oversensitive, or must have misunderstood me. I’m sorry that you are so upset.”

The first statement is a statement of fact, the second statement is a statement of mythology.

For about six months, Christina and I had lengthy conversations about what I called “zinging.”

Christina would say something that hurt me, and I would express my surprise and upset. With total sincerity, she would apologize for the fact that I got hurt, claiming that she had no intention to hurt me, that she had no idea that it would be hurtful, and so on. To her endless credit, she did not say or imply that I was oversensitive or paranoid.

I replied that I completely believed that she did not consciously want to hurt me – since that would be sadistic, and thus would be a complete deal-breaker as far as the relationship went.

This was very confusing for her, of course, and was a great challenge to her sense of her own virtue and benevolence. As we continued to work on this problem of, “Stef gets hurt despite the fact that Christina has no desire to hurt him,” we did slowly get to the point where Christina was willing to explore her own history, and how she was never really apologized to in her own childhood, after she was hurt.

Eventually, we got to the point where we understood that Christina had been treated callously or cruelly at times in her childhood, and then when she expressed hurt everyone told her that no one had any intention to hurt her, that she was oversensitive, and so must have misunderstood the intentions of those around her. If she continued to express her upset, she was punished. When she was spanked, her mother would snap: “Why are you crying?”

The ironic thing about this all-too-typical interaction is that Christina was in fact ignoring her own hurt feelings rather than mine – and those hurt feelings existed in her past, not in my present.

Human beings are in essence pattern-making machines. In her childhood, Christina’s hurt feelings were endlessly minimized and ignored by others, and so a pattern was set up within her own mind, which was: “hurt = minimize.”

When her parents hurt her, and she expressed pain, her parents then experienced pain themselves – since no one really wants to hurt someone they claim to love. (Certainly when Christina finally understood that she was in fact causing me pain through her stinging comments, it was very painful to her – both because she did not want to cause me pain in the present, and because she then re-experienced her own childhood pain.)

Since Christina’s parents did not want to experience the pain and anxiety of having caused their child pain, they blamed her sensitivity and paranoia for causing her pain – and so, by extension, their pain.

In other words, it was fundamentally their own pain that they were minimizing – their dismissal of Christina’s criticisms was an effect of their own self rejection.

They rejected Christina because they rejected themselves.

Feel the Burn!

One of the problems that arises from this habitual interaction is the lack of feedback it creates.

In fact, it could be said that the entire point of this book is to convince you that you need to feel pain.

Pain is healthy, pain is good – pain is essential to the healthy functioning of mind and body.

If we could will away the agony of a toothache, we would become very ill and possibly die. If we did not walk gingerly on a sprained ankle, we could create chronic bone problems. If we did not reduce our use of a pulled muscle, we could tear it irretrievably.

We understand the value of pain in the physical sense – however, in the emotional realm we have access to a numbing drug called “blame” that seductively promises to eliminate our anxiety, guilt, shame and remorse in the moment.

If we understand our use of blame as a classic addiction, it becomes far easier to comprehend.

We can look at an addiction as any habit that reduces anxiety or pain in the moment at the cost of failing to address (and probably exacerbating) the underlying cause.

If I take a mood-enhancing drug because I feel sad, I am not dealing with my sadness, but just “nuking” the symptom. If I take sleeping pills because I am too stressed to sleep, I am only solving the problem of being awake, not of being stressed.

Of course, it can be highly beneficial to minimize discomfort while dealing with the real underlying issue – i.e. to use Novocain during a root canal, or take antidepressants while going to therapy – as long as the underlying issue is in fact being addressed.

In the same way, there are many ways that we can approach each other’s irrationalities which minimize defensive reactions and upsets. What is not productive, however, is temporarily eliminating anxiety by permanently ignoring the problem.

The most common way of eliminating discomfort in the moment is to create a story which eliminates responsibility.

Eliminating Responsibility

One continual pattern in life is that people will drive around for years looking for a suitable cliff, take a running leap over the edge, and then spend decades complaining that they were unjustly pushed.

A woman will spend years dating and choosing a man, and then months or years in a relationship, and then months engaged, and then get married – and then with a completely straight face complain about her husband, saying with all sincerity that she had “no idea” about his true nature.

No Idea?

There are really only three possibilities when a woman says that she had “no idea” that her husband was X, Y or Z – despite having years to get to know him before marrying him.

If she is genuinely clueless about her husband, then either she is functionally retarded in her ability to judge people, or he is a truly cunning sociopath who can mask his true nature for years, with no clues whatsoever about his dangerous or dysfunctional nature – or she is lying about her ignorance of his nature.

In the first case, she may well complain about her husband, but it could be easily said that he has far more to complain about her, in that she has a negative ability to judge people and very likely needs help tying her shoes. She thought that her boyfriend was the best guy for her, and he turns out to be problematic in significant areas. That is not just a misjudgment, but rather an anti-judgment. It’s not like taking a shortcut that doesn’t work out as efficiently as you hoped: it is more like continually driving the completely wrong way while checking the map and stopping to ask for directions.

If the woman really is that foolish, then she would be too vapid to actually blame her husband for what he does, since her understanding of cause and effect would be so absent that she would be more likely to blame her unhappiness on the motion of the moon.

If she can correctly identify her husband’s dysfunctional behaviour as the “cause” of her unhappiness, then she is intelligent enough to have perceived his true nature long before they even became boyfriend and girlfriend.

If she then says that her husband is truly a cunning sociopath who fooled everyone for years, then we know that she is lying. There is no possibility that a sociopath can be so cunning that he can fool everyone for years about his true nature. If this were possible, then there would never be such a diagnosis as “sociopathic,” because such creatures would be able to avoid or mask their symptoms in all possible scenarios and tests.

Thus it can never be possible that a wife can complain first and foremost about the actions of her partner. This would be equivalent to a dermatologist blaming the sun for his sunburn.

Common Stories

Stories are characterized by a number of common traits. The first and most obvious is the use of the words “always” and “never.”

For instance, a husband may say to his wife, “You never support me!”

His wife may retort: “You always accuse me of that!”

Other common stories include:

• “I have to do everything around here.”
• “You never take responsibility for your actions.”
• “Why don’t you ever just sit down and really talk to me?”
• “You never lift a finger around here unless I tell you what to do.”
• “You’re just so passive.”
• “You never take initiative.”
• “You’re just lazy.”
• “You’re so vain.”
• “It’s like you’re married to that computer!” (Sorry, my voice recognition software was running when my wife came into the room…)

You never support me…

Let’s take a look at this statement and see how we know that it is a story.

If I tell you that you never support me, then that is either true or it is abusive. In other words, any time I tell you something negative about yourself – particularly if it is an absolute statement – then either I am telling you the truth about yourself or I am lying to you in order to hurt you. (For more on this, see my book: “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion.”)

If it is true that you have never supported me, then either you lack the capacity to support anyone, or you have the capacity to support others but choose not to support me.

If you lack the capacity to support anyone, ever, in any way whatsoever, then criticizing you for this lack is the direct equivalent of criticizing a man with no arms for his inability to play basketball, or calling a non-Greek speaker “stupid” for not being able to speak Greek.

Clearly, when we criticize someone, we can only do so with justice if he is capable of correcting his behaviour. This is why no person with any sensitivity calls a mentally retarded person “stupid,” a woman in traction “lazy,” or a man with Tourette’s syndrome “rude.”

If the behaviour cannot be corrected, then criticizing it is abusive.

Assuming you can…

Assuming that you are capable of supporting me, if I tell you that you never support me then either you have a desire to support me – but choose not to – or you do not have a desire to support me at all.

If you know how to support someone, but do not have a desire to support me at all, then clearly you believe that I am not worthy of being supported. In other words, there are people in your life that you do want to support – and do support – but I am not one of them. This must be because I am behaving poorly relative to those other people that you support, since supporting someone is an act of love.

If my bad behaviour is causing you to refrain from supporting me, even though you could, then if I attack you for your lack of support, this will only make you less likely to want to support me.

It is ridiculous for me to criticize your behaviour in such a way that I reinforce that behaviour. This is exactly like a woman giving her husband money to gamble, going with him to the casino and cheering him on, and then laying into him about his gambling habit. It certainly happens, of course, but it is quite ridiculous.

Furthermore, supporting someone must involve believing in his better nature or potential and helping him to achieve it in a positive manner. If I roundly criticize you for failing to support me, then I am saying that it would be better or nobler for you to support me. However, I am not at all helping you to achieve that “better” state in a positive manner, but rather just attacking you for failing to achieve it.

In other words, attacking you for failing to support me is the exact opposite of being supportive.

In this way, I am modeling the exact same behaviour that I condemn as unjust and unworthy in you.

Is it any wonder, then, that you hesitate to support me?

When I attack you for failing to support me, it is exactly the same as if I were a chronic liar proclaiming my honesty and demanding that you tell me the truth.

Yuck.

Lacking Knowledge?

On the other hand, if you have a desire to support me, but do not, then clearly what you lack is the knowledge of how to support me.

If the only thing that you lack is a knowledge of how to support me, then the only way that I can practically get you to support me is to give you that knowledge.

If I am Chinese, and I want you to be able to talk to my parents, who do not speak English, then I would respectfully ask that you learn Mandarin.

If you agree to learn Mandarin, then the question is whether I or someone else will teach you.

If I will teach you, then obviously I must be able to speak Mandarin in order to be able to teach you. If I do not speak Mandarin, then it would be highly hypocritical of me to criticize you for your inability to speak Mandarin.

Also, at a very practical level, I would be unable to teach you the language.

If I told you that it was of great value to be able to speak to my parents in Mandarin, but I did not speak Mandarin myself, then clearly the solution would be for both of us to take classes in Mandarin.

If I did speak Mandarin and I offered to teach you the language, it would only make sense to accept my offer if I was in fact a good teacher.

If my “courses” in Mandarin consisted of me yelling at you that you just aren’t getting the language – in an incomprehensible foreign language no less – then clearly I in fact have no interest whatsoever in actually teaching you Mandarin.

Instead, I am using my knowledge of Mandarin to humiliate you, by setting up a standard called “learn Mandarin,” and then making it completely impossible for you to learn that language.

If, at some point, you found out that the incomprehensible foreign language that I was yelling at you in was not in fact Mandarin, but some sort of gibberish, and that I did not know Mandarin at all, then you would very likely become completely enraged at my hypocrisy, condescension, and manipulation.

What are the odds that you would ever respect me as a teacher, friend or companion again?

Such are the perils of manipulative storytelling.

What on Earth?

What on earth could be the motivations for such a dysfunctional interaction? Why would I want to attack someone for not supporting me – distinctly unsupportive behaviour – when I actually could be supported if I modeled better behaviour, or chose a better partner?

In other words, if I so greatly fear being unsupported, why would I create conditions which will inevitably result in me being unsupported?

The Boxer

Why is it that we are so inevitably drawn to re-create that which we most fear?

To understand that, let us look at the parable of a boxer named Simon.

As a child, Simon is subjected to physical abuse. He is slapped, pushed, punched and beaten.

Since he is a child, he is helpless to resist these attacks. How, then, can he survive them?

Well, since clearly he cannot master his environment, or those who are abusing him, that leaves only one choice for poor Simon.

Simon must master himself.

He cannot master his attackers – or their attacks – he can only master his reaction to their attacks.

He has no control over the external world – he can only have control over his internal world.

All children take pleasure in exercising increasing levels of control over their environment. If control over their external environment is impossible, however, they have no choice but to start exercising increasing control over their internal environment: their thoughts and feelings.

This is all quite logical, and something that we would all wish for, as the best way to survive an impossible situation.

If we cannot get rid of the source of our pain, what we most desire is to get rid of the pain itself.

The Relief of Self-Control

Thus Simon grows up gaining a sense of efficacy and power by controlling his own pain, fear and hatred.

The pleasure that most children get out of mastering external tasks such as tying their shoelaces, catching a ball and learning to skate, Simon gets out of “rising above” and controlling his terrifying emotions.

Can we blame Simon for this? If anaesthetic is readily available, would we want to scream through an appendectomy without it?

When Simon is young, his self-control remains relatively stable. As he gets older, though, his parents slowly begin to reduce the amount of physical abuse they inflict on him. This is particularly true during and after puberty, when he is becoming old enough to tell others about the abuse, and also because his increasing size makes it less and less possible to dominate him physically.

How does Simon feel about these decreasing physical attacks?

Two words: terrified and disoriented.

Simon’s entire sense of power and efficacy – his very identity even – has been defined by his ability to master and control his own emotions in the face of terrifying abuse.

In other words, in the absence of abuse, he has no sense of control, efficacy or power.

In addition to being taught all the wrong things, Simon has also been taught almost none of the right things. He does not know how to negotiate, he does not know how to express his emotions, he has not been taught empathy, he has not been taught sensitivity, he has not been taught win-win interactions – the words that are missing from Simon’s social vocabulary could fill a shelf of dictionaries.

Thus, in the absence of violence, not only does Simon feel powerless – since his sense of “power” arose primarily as the result of his ability to survive violence – but he is also increasingly thrust into a world of voluntarism, where sophisticated skills of self-expression and negotiation are required for success.

As he enters into his teenage years, for the first time since he was very young Simon feels excruciatingly powerless – and vulnerable.

Since vulnerability was the original state he was in before he began to repress and control his emotional responses to those around him, he unconsciously feels that he is in enormous danger. (This arises from the reality that he was in enormous danger when he was a child, but he is only now feeling it for the first time.)

The reason that he disowned his emotions in the first place was because he felt fear and hatred in the face of physical attacks. It was the reality of his vulnerability that provoked the self-defence of dissociation and “self-mastery.”

Thus for Simon, vulnerability is always followed by excruciating and self-annihilating attacks.

Having spent years mastering his responses to these attacks, he has not learned how to deal with vulnerability in a positive and self-expressed manner.

As he becomes an adult, however, Simon no longer needs to defend himself against attacks – thus undermining his sense of control – and he also moves faster and faster into a world of voluntary interactions for which he is utterly unprepared.

Simon also unconsciously knows that learning the skills necessary to flourish in this voluntary world – if that is even possible for him anymore – will take years of excruciating labour.

Fleeing the future for the past…

Simon has access to a drug that can instantly make all of his anxiety go away. This drug can restore his sense of control, eliminate his bottomless terror of voluntary interactions, and place him right back in familiar territory where he feels efficacious, powerful and in control.

That drug, of course, is violence.

Simon finds that when he leaves the world of voluntary interactions and re-enters the world of violence and abuse, his anxiety vanishes. His sense of efficacy and control returns, and he feels mastery over his own world again.

Like an army that does not want to be disbanded, in the absence of external enemies, Simon must create them.

After realizing the relative joy and serenity that he feels after getting involved in physical fights, Simon goes down to his local gym and puts on some boxing gloves.

He finds that he is very good in the ring, because where other people feel fear and caution, he, due to his years of self-mastery, feels power and control. When he is in the ring he does not feel anxious, he does not feel afraid – he does not even feel angry – he simply feels the satisfaction of being in a situation that he can control.

The endorphins released in Simon’s system by violence quickly become addictive.

True addiction requires both a highly positive reaction from taking a drug and a highly negative reaction from abstaining from it. For Simon, boxing not only restores his sense of control, but it also eliminates the crippling anxiety he feels in the absence of violence.

Sadly, familiarity breeds content…

This is the psychological story of a boxer, of course, but it can equally apply to criminals, soldiers, policemen, and others drawn to dangerous situations.

Simon was utterly terrified of violence when he was a child, so how can we understand his pursuit of boxing as a career when he becomes an adult?

When we become addicted to controlling our fears, we can no longer live without either control or fear.

Simon became addicted to controlling his responses to abuse – thus he can no longer function in the absence of abuse.

Addiction also worsens when every step down the road of repetition makes it that much harder to turn around.

This applies to Simon in many, many terrible ways.

Every time he uses the defences he developed in his childhood, he reinforces the value of violence in his adult life. Every time he avoids the anxiety of voluntary and positive interactions through the use of violence, he takes yet another step away from learning how to negotiate in a positive manner with kind and worthwhile people.

In other words, every time he “uses” the drug of violence, he makes the next “use” of violence that much more likely – and resisting the drug that much harder.

In this way, we can truly understand how a man can be drawn to endlessly repeat that which terrified him the most as a child.

In hopefully less extreme ways, Simon’s story can also help us understand why we are so drawn to repeat that which we fear the most.

Were you rejected as a child? Beware your desire for rejection.

Were you verbally abused as a child? Watch out for verbally abusive people: they will inject you with addictive endorphins.

Were you sexually abused as a child? Watch out for predators: they will tempt you with the self-medication of surviving them.

The Sadist

The above analogy can help us understand how someone can end up spending his whole life attempting to “master” violence.

However, at least Simon is getting into the ring with an equal. How can we understand a parent who ends up abusing his or her child?

A basic fact of human nature is that it is impossible for anyone to do anything that involves a moral choice without moral justification. George Bush could not invade Iraq without claiming that it was an act of “self-defence,” or “just punishment.” When parents talk about screaming at or hitting their children, they always justify their actions by claiming that, “We have tried everything else and gotten nowhere.” Or, they claim that their exasperated responses are generated by the misbehaviour of their children: “He just doesn’t listen; he doesn’t show us the proper respect,” etc.

It is impossible to imagine a parent standing in front of a mirror and saying: “I am abusing my innocent child.” Any parent capable of making such a statement would have recoiled in horror the first time that he yelled at or struck his child, and sought the necessary help.

Continued abuse requires continual moral justifications. In fact, the very worst aspects of the abuse that a child receives are not so much the physical fear and pain, but rather the moral corruption of the lies that are told to justify the abuse.

For a child, being beaten is terrible, but being repeatedly told that the beating is a just response to his “bad” actions is worse.

So – how could this possibly come about?

Child Abuse

For the sake of this example, let us assume that the parent was abused in her own childhood, as is so often the case.

We will take the example of a mother named Wendy, who ends up verbally abusing her daughter Sally.

Wendy was verbally abused when she was a child. She was told that she was bad, disrespectful, disobedient, ungrateful, selfish and so on.

From Wendy’s childhood perspective, her own mother loomed like a titan in her little world. One of the amazing things about the differences in perspective between parent and child is that the parent screams and hits because the parent feels helpless. However, to the child, the parent seems virtually omnipotent.

We can assume that the Christian God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because He felt helpless to reform its inhabitants. However, from the standpoint of the city-dwellers burning alive in a sea of flames, God’s complaint that He felt helpless would be utterly incomprehensible. If God is all-powerful, as He claims, how can he claim frustrated helplessness as his motivation? If an all-powerful deity cannot reform individuals, how can those individuals, with infinitely less power, be expected to reform themselves?

If parents knew how large they loomed in their child’s world, they would use a far, far lighter touch in their discipline. When you are around somebody whose hearing is preternaturally sensitive, you only need to whisper; yelling is both unnecessary and abusive.

When Wendy was a child, her mother’s verbal abuse was utterly overwhelming. The stress of having someone five times your size, who has complete and utter power over you, yelling at you, putting you down, denigrating you, or abusing you in some other manner causes a fundamental short-circuit in a child’s neurological system. It is the equivalent of taking a man terrified of heights and constantly dangling him out the open door of an airplane. He may “acclimatize” himself to the repetitively awful stimulation, but only through extreme dissociation from his environment, which comes at a terrible personal cost. Victims of repetitive torture undergo the same “out of body” experience wherein they cease to feel, and in many ways cease to live, at least emotionally.

When a child is abused, she experiences her life as a series of fundamentally impossible situations. The capacity to abuse arises out of a lack of bonding, a lack of empathy, an absence of sensitivity towards the feelings of the child.

A child’s only security is her bond with her parent. Abuse is a deliberate severing of that bond – a “strangling with the umbilical.” Abusing a child requires that you eliminate your capacity to empathize with her. If a child perceives that she cannot rely on her bond with her mother – which is to say that her mother’s capacity to empathize with her comes and goes at best – then the child feels fundamentally insecure, because positive and empathetic treatment cannot be relied on.

When you are under the total power of someone who can treat you badly whenever she feels like it, you are placed into an impossible situation because that person will inevitably command you to show “respect” and “love” towards her.

If your abusive mother detects that you fear her, for instance, she will generally react with aggression. If at a dinner party your mother raises her hand and you cower in fear and beg her not to hit you, she will get very angry.

Thus you must pretend on the outside the opposite of what you feel on the inside. You must show “love” and/or “respect” despite feeling fear and hatred.

Thus, when Wendy’s mother verbally abused her, Wendy could not react with fear or hatred, because that would only increase her mother’s attacks. (“I’ll give you something to cry about!”)

Thus Wendy had to disown and repress her own authentic emotional responses and mimic their exact opposite. All her fear and pain had to be “magically” transformed into “love” and “respect.”

This form of the “Stockholm Syndrome” has disastrous effects on a child’s long-term emotional development and integrity. Instead of learning how to interact in a rational manner with reality, the child ends up forced into a situation of eternal hyper-vigilance wherein she constantly scans the behaviour of those around her, endlessly alert for any signs of an impending attack.

If you are driving a car and suddenly notice a number of wasps in the car with you, it will become very hard to concentrate on the road. In addition, imagine that you had to keep driving under increasingly difficult conditions, while the number of buzzing wasps in your car kept multiplying – all the while knowing that you were allergic to wasp venom – this is the endless livid terror of all too many childhoods.

This kind of terrible “split focus” (“I must keep driving / I must not get stung”) empties out the spontaneity and richness of the child’s inner life. Just as we cannot daydream while being pushed out of a plane, we cannot develop an internal discourse with ourselves if we are in a constant state of hyper-vigilance with regards to our surroundings.

If a child in an abusive environment stops scanning for danger, the pain of being attacked is then combined with the shock of surprise, and the inevitable self-flagellation for lowering one’s guard. Daydreaming, or self-conversation, thus becomes a form of “self abuse,” insofar as it increases the risk and agony of being attacked – it becomes as dangerous as a tightrope-walker losing his concentration and risking falling to his death.

This terrible equation – “relaxation = danger” – keeps the child in a constant state of high alert, of hyper-vigilance, and effectively prevents her from ever coming to a true understanding of her situation.

In a nation, a state of war creates the panic, haste and hysteria that prevents people from effectively questioning their government. Just so does hyper-vigilance in childhood prevent children from rationally evaluating their parents’ behaviour.

Thus, with all this in place, when Wendy becomes an adult and gives birth to Sally, an awful series of events is set into motion.

The Child Unafraid…

To understand how parental cruelty comes into being, the first and most important fact to remember is that children enter this world in an un-abused state. They are not afraid, they are not hyper-vigilant, they are not twisted, they have not become enemies to themselves or others – they are curious, perceptive, engaged and benevolent.

Remember – as a child, Wendy learned that relaxation was danger. Thus when Sally is born, Sally is fundamentally relaxed in a way that Wendy has no conscious memory of.

Since for Wendy relaxation is followed by attack, Sally’s relaxation creates great anxiety for her mother, because she associates it with an impending attack. In the same way, if Sally were crawling towards a set of steep stairs, Wendy would feel great anxiety and a compulsion to snatch Sally away from the impending danger – very aggressively if need be.

For Wendy, then, when Sally in all innocence engages in actions that in Wendy’s world would have triggered a terrible attack, it reawakens all of the repressed pain, fear and hatred in Wendy’s heart. When this occurs again and again, Wendy genuinely feels that Sally is creating or causing terrible attacks of pain, fear and hatred in her.

Now, the last time that someone else created pain and fear in Wendy, it was her own mother attacking her when she was a child. For Wendy, then, any sudden eruption of pain and fear is associated with a direct attack. Thus for Wendy, Sally’s innocent anxiety-provoking behaviour is the direct emotional equivalent of her parents’ abusive attacks.

Furthermore, the only way that Wendy could create any sense of security and control as a child was to brutally repress her own emotional responses. In other words, “that which causes anxiety must be brutally repressed” is the law of her emotional land.

Now, when Wendy was a child she could not brutally repress her own parents, because that created further attacks – thus she had to brutally repress her own anxieties.

The difference with her own child, however, is that she now has the power to repress Sally, which she did not have with her own parents when she was a child.

It is in this way that she makes the transformation from victim to abuser.

Since she experiences Sally’s actions as attacks upon herself, Wendy feels justified in controlling Sally’s behaviour so that these attacks do not occur.

If our child continually kicks us in the shins, we consider it good parenting to prevent this child from acting in such an abusive manner. We must do whatever it takes, we say to ourselves, to prevent our child from hurting others. What will happen, we think, if we allow our child to act in such a horrible manner? A life of brutality, loneliness and rejection seems inevitable, and we could scarcely call ourselves good parents if we allowed that to happen.

Many parents start off with relatively calm and patient lectures, but the absolute of “thou shalt not” remains determinedly hovering, in the not-too-distant background.

“It upsets Mommy when you act like that,” we may say gently – however, like the initially polite letters from the IRS, a not too subtle threat is always visible between the lines. We talk about “politeness,” “niceness” and “consideration for the feelings of others,” and so on, but what we are really saying is: “It makes me angry when you make me anxious, so you’d better stop!”

Children, due to their amazingly perceptive natures, find it hard to take these lectures seriously, because they sense the contradiction and narcissism at the root of such speeches. Thus they generally tend to continue to do what comes naturally to them, despite the anxiety that their actions cause other people.

Since the children remain in an un-brutalized state, they do not themselves directly feel the anxiety that their actions provoke in their brutalized parents. In the same way, if I do not have a migraine, playing loud music will bring me pleasure. If I do have a migraine, obviously it will not.

Since children continue to do what comes naturally to them, and since their actions continue to provoke anxiety, pain and rage in their parents, their parents feel a growing sense of helplessness and frustration and an increasing loss of control over their own emotions.

The basic lesson that Wendy learned in her own terrible childhood was that when someone does something that makes you feel bad, the solution is to stop the other person from doing that thing.

Thus, when Sally’s actions provoke awful feelings in Wendy, Wendy’s inevitable reaction is to prevent Sally from performing those actions, so that Wendy does not have to feel those terrible emotions.

To be a “good” daughter, Sally must stop doing whatever causes Wendy anxiety.

If Sally continues to act in a way that causes her mother anxiety, Wendy will be inevitably driven to the “conclusion” that Sally wants to cause her pain – or, at best, is utterly indifferent to the pain that her actions cause.

In this way, Wendy can frame a perception of her daughter that includes the pejoratives “cruel” and “selfish.”

Now, the battle lines are truly becoming drawn.

If we say to our child: “Stop doing ‘X,’ because it makes me feel bad,” surely the solution is simply for the child to stop doing ‘X,’ right?

Sadly, no.

The Escalation…

The true nature of Sally’s “offense” towards Wendy is that Sally is unafraid.

Remember that in Wendy’s childhood, being unafraid always invited attack – or made the inevitable attack even worse. Thus Sally’s state of calm or self-possession creates an overwhelming sense of “impending doom” for Wendy.

When Wendy was a child, spontaneous self-expression invited attack. Now that she is a mother, when Sally sits and sings to herself, this causes increasing anxiety in Wendy, and at some point she will express disapproval to Sally.

At this point, perhaps Sally stops singing. However, five minutes later, Sally states that she wants to go for a walk.

In Wendy’s world, expressing an open desire always invited attack – thus when Sally says that she wants to go for a walk, Wendy also feels anxiety, and once more snaps at Sally.

As we can imagine, this process can go on and on virtually ad infinitum.

There is no end to the escalation of “little rules” that end up snaking around Sally, like an infinity of tiny spider webs that eventually leave her bound and immobile.

However, even if Sally were to obey every single one of her mother’s “rules,” she would still not be safe.

As Sally becomes more and more inhibited and more and more fearful, Wendy begins to feel guiltier and guiltier. Sadly, Wendy also interprets this as some sort of “manipulative aggression” on Sally’s part and so is inevitably drawn to accuse Sally of “playing the victim” in order to make Wendy feel bad.

In this way, there is no possibility whatsoever that Sally can ever satisfy her mother.

If Sally acts in a natural, independent manner, she provokes an attack. If she acts in an unnatural, obedient manner, she provokes an attack. Since she can neither be spontaneous nor obedient, neither act nor refrain from acting, there is nothing that she can do to avoid being attacked or criticized in some manner.

The Evil At The Core…

The central problem is that Wendy is attempting to manage her own anxiety by controlling Sally.

However, since Sally is not the actual source of Wendy’s anxiety, controlling Sally’s behaviour will only temporarily alleviate Wendy’s anxiety – while making it worse deep down, since she is acting unjustly and blaming Sally for her own feelings.

Controlling the Bed

To understand this madness more fully, imagine that you are bedridden in a hospital and I am standing by the controls of the bed.

“Can you raise the head of my bed so that I can eat?” you ask.

I push a button, but nothing happens. I push another button and your head goes down.

“No, no!” you cry. “Up, I want my head to come up!”

I push another button, and both your legs and head start to rise, causing you pain.

“Ow! Not that way, just my head!”

As you can well imagine, this process will generate an extraordinary amount of frustration and tension in both of us. You would be panicking and yelling at me, and I would be frantically stabbing at the buttons trying to control or reverse whatever motion was giving you such discomfort.

Now imagine further that at some point, we discover that I am actually pressing the controls of a bed in another room, and the reason that your bed is moving “randomly” is that you are in fact sitting on the controls for your own bed, and your shifting around is what is causing the uncomfortable movements.

Clearly, the first thing that you would do is apologize to me for blaming me for your discomfort, and for railing against my “incompetence.”

This is the typical experience of someone who finally understands that using other people to manage his anxiety only makes his anxiety worse, causing him to further attempt to control and manipulate others, when the whole time he is “sitting on the controls” that only he can reach.

Why is this so important?

The reason that we are spending all this time focusing on how abusive tendencies come about is because it is essential to understand the genesis of the mythologies that separate us from each other.

When we look at the interaction between Wendy and Sally, we can understand that Wendy’s bad behaviour predated her justifications for that bad behaviour.

Due to her rejection of her own history, Wendy ended up attacking her daughter.

This shameful action produced a great stress in Wendy, because she wants to be – and believes herself to be – a good, fair and just person.

However, continually snapping at a child, or verbally abusing her in some other manner scarcely sits well with a benevolent and virtuous self-image.

Self–Mythology

When we perform actions that we cannot justify to ourselves, we have one of two choices. We can either recognize that we have a significant moral flaw and go through the painful work of starting to correct it, or we can say that our actions resulted from a significant moral flaw in someone else, and go through the far less painful work of starting to “correct” the other person’s flaws.

In other words, if I am angry at you, and I cannot believe that I am unjustly or abusively angry at you – which would be the case if you did nothing to provoke my anger – then I must convince myself that my anger is a just response to injustice or abuse from you.

As mentioned earlier, this shifting of moral blame is called projection, which is a wonderful word on many levels – not only does it connote the shining of an image onto a blank surface, but it also invokes a “movie” metaphor, which includes the artistic fiction that it so often actually represents.

The Crossroads

When Wendy stands over her child, her voice hoarse and her hands shaking, looking down into Sally’s bewildered and frightened eyes, it is a moment of truth for her very soul.

If Wendy recognizes that she has just attacked a helpless and dependent child – which can never be justified in any terms – then she can begin to take the necessary and humbling steps of learning how to control her temper and hopefully, over time, win back the trust of her child.

However, the majority of parents feel the terror and vulnerability within their own hearts when looking into the horrified eyes of their children – and then take the terrible step of inventing a fiction wherein the children are the perpetrators – and they, the parents, are the victims.

Remember, in the religious approach we are always taught to create sinners to blame for our mistakes – and the more immoral our errors, the worse the sinner must be.

“Look what you made me do!” is the brutal and vengeful cry that erupts from the tortured souls of the parents.

“Only a bad child would turn me into this!”

Religion and Mythology

Why is it that we are so invariably drawn to making up self-justifying stories, rather than accepting the truth about our own capacity for doing harm?

Child abuse is just one of the many, many destructive fallouts that result from our addiction to the superstitions of religion.

Religion completely externalizes the moral – and immoral – decisions of mankind. “Virtue” is obedience to the whimsical dictates of a self-contradictory deity, while “vice” is surrender to the whimsical temptations of a self-contradictory devil.

“The devil made me do it,” (often supplemented with “I was weak!”) is a constant cry among the religious – while these cultists often believe that they have the choice to reject temptation, the devil is very strong, and human flesh is invariably weak.

Furthermore, children are not only born un-abused, they are also born fundamentally anti-religious. (If you doubt this, try taking away a four-year-old’s Halloween candy and saying he will get 100 times more candy after he is dead!)

Children are empirical, secular, rational and fundamentally scientific. In fact, the progression of competence in a child’s mind directly follows the scientific method. For instance, in the first few years a child develops the recognition of causality, by tracking an object with his eyes or turning his head at a sound, followed by “object permanence,” such as recognizing that a ball placed under a blanket still exists, which then develops into basic problem solving with these objects. As the child continues to develop, these basic problem solving skills are refined by more formal use of logic in every aspect of life: identity, language, values, etc.

Just as it takes an enormous amount of statist propaganda to turn a child into a dogmatic Soviet Marxist, it takes an endless amount of religious propaganda to turn a child into a dazed “worshiper” of imaginary ghosts.

Children are not even naturally agnostic. To test this proposition, simply give a child an empty box as a birthday present and tell him that there may be an iPod in it, but there’s just no way to know for sure, so he cannot really tell you that there is no iPod in there!

See if he thanks you for this “gift” or not.

Thus, the subjugation of children in terms of religion is based on the subjugation of children to stories – exploitive, abusive, ghastly, disorienting and manipulative stories.

In reality, of course, it is impossible for a child to obey the Bible or the Koran or the Torah, because they are simply dead books with no capacity to reward or punish.

No, the subjugation of children is fundamentally the enslavement of children to storytellers – their obedience to the whims of others, presented as absolute moral and metaphysical facts.

Enslavement to the idea that the stories of others are absolute facts is a crushing blow to a child’s capacity to process objective reality – and, to the great benefit of those in authority, to criticize or question the errors of those who “teach” them.

Thus, since children are trained to automatically obey “stories,” when an abusive parent aggressively tells a new “story,” which is that the aggression of the parent was directly caused by the actions of the child, the child can only nod numbly and blame himself.

For a more detailed explanation of this, listen to podcast 70 at http://www.freedomain.com/Traffic_Jams/how_to_control_a_human_soul.mp3.

VIRTUE AND LOVE

Honesty is the First Virtue

Honesty is the first virtue in every relationship – and most importantly our relationship with our self.

Mythology is the opposite of honesty, because mythology provides the appearance of truth, which prevents us from actively continuing to pursue the truth.

In this section I will put forward the thesis that our existing relationships are not primarily with each other, but with our own mythologies, with our own stories about our interactions with each other.

Mother Theresa used to say that she was not administering to the poor, but rather to Christ in the poor, which is a very different thing. Since Christ “the man-god who strolled the waves and came back from the dead” is a mere fantasy, Mother Theresa did not have a relationship with the poor as individuals, but rather with her own projected fantasy of “service” to a nonexistent deity. This is a form of spiritual “stalking.”

I may as well say that I do not have a relationship with my girlfriend, but rather with the “leprechaun in my girlfriend.”

Clearly, if I say that, I am openly admitting that I do not have a relationship with anyone or anything – outside my own fantasies of course.

“Not Even Wrong”

In the world of science, the worst judgment that can be passed upon a theory is that it is “not even wrong” – in other words, it is so incomprehensible or self-contradictory that nothing can be even learned from its mistakes.

“2 + 2 = 5” is wrong; “2 + blue = unicorn” is “not even wrong.”

If I am patriotic, then clearly I am not in love with “the land” itself, since that is just earth and rock. I am not in love with the grass, or the trees, or the mountains or the clouds. I can say that I am in love with the ideals of the country that I live in, or its best and most virtuous principles – but clearly, those “ideals” exist only as ideas within the minds of those around me. If I say that I love “America,” I am really saying that I love my fellow Americans, since “America” is a concept, and has no real existence in the objective world.

Since “America” does not exist, I cannot love it, any more than I can marry a leprechaun or send the concept of “children“” to school. Thus if I claim to love my fellow “Americans,” I am not claiming to love any particular individual for his specific virtues, but rather a general group in relation to a concept that does not exist.

Of course, a “general group” is also a concept that does not exist in reality, and so when I claim to be patriotic, I am in fact expressing affection with regards to a generalized and abstract “group” (which does not in fact exist) in relation to a “country” (which does not in fact exist).

“Patriotism” is thus a mythology which separates us as individuals, because the primary relationship of the patriot is to a projected abstraction, rather than to any individuals in particular. The patriot “loves” his fellow countrymen in the same way that Mother Teresa “loves” the poor – it is a narcissistic projection, not a mature acceptance of another individual soul.

The sad thing about this is that we cannot in fact have any relationships to our mythologies, any more than we can soul-kiss our reflection in the mirror, or sit down with “the country” for nice cup of coffee and a chat.

Mythology always isolates – we can only meet in reality.

Relatedness

To be “related” to someone – to have intimacy – clearly requires that both parties feel free to speak their minds, commit to listening, and strive to understand each other.

In other words, relationships are fundamentally defined by reciprocity.

Clearly, you and I do not have a “relationship” if you forbid me to provide any feedback about anything you say or do. If I am not allowed to change my facial expression, open my mouth and say anything, or provide any response or feedback to your words or actions, then clearly I cannot be said to be having a relationship with you in any way at all.

Clearly, any intimate relationship also requires that both parties respect each other’s thoughts, emotions and opinions. I cannot say that you and I are “close,” while at the same time disagreeing with everything that you say, and criticizing everything that you do.

Similarly, intimacy requires feedback that is objective. If you show me a portrait you have painted and I tell you that it is terrible because I am jealous of how good it is, clearly the feedback that I’m giving you is not objective. This is equally true if I tell you that your portrait is wonderful when it is not because I am afraid of hurting your feelings.

This requirement for objective feedback does not exist only in relation to external objects.

If I am angry with you, and you ask me how I am feeling, and I tell you that I am “fine,” then I am not giving you objective feedback. Expecting any relationship to flourish when you mislead your partner is like expecting a doctor to cure the pain in your arm after you tell him that your leg is hurting.

Thus if you and I have an intimate relationship, it must be true that we are giving each other objective and authentic feedback. We cannot be “close” if everything I say to you is a lie, or if every emotion that I claim to feel is manufactured – or, of course, if I only tell you what I think you “want to hear,” or keep silent out of fear, or actively mislead you.

Intimacy and Value

Similarly, intimacy cannot coexist with any sort of “third-party validation” of each other’s value.

If I date you only because you “look good on my arm,” then it is not because I find particular value in you, but rather because I imagine that other people will find “value” in your appearance. If a woman marries a doctor because she primarily desires the prestige of being a doctor’s wife, then the value of the man she is marrying is defined by the possible judgments of other people – not the man in and of himself.

An actor who befriends an agent in the hopes of gaining representation cannot claim to be “close” to that agent, but rather is using him as a means to an end. This is not always bad, of course – economically, I “use” my grocer as a means to the end of getting food, just as he “uses” me as a means to the end of getting money – but I would certainly not claim that I am “close” to my grocer!

Reciprocity

Without reciprocity, relationships are empty, manipulative, meaningless – and somewhat delusional.

We would not look at a ventriloquist who said “I have a close relationship with my dummy,” as particularly sane or healthy, because his dummy, being functionally inert, clearly cannot provide any objective reciprocity in such a “relationship.”

Also, if the primary “reciprocity” in a relationship is based on third-party validation, then clearly individual, or one-on-one reciprocity, is not particularly present.

If a woman dates a man because he is “so cute that her friends will be envious,” then obviously her primary relationship is with her friends, not with the cute man. He is merely a means to an end, which is the envy of her friends. Thus the primary reciprocity she experiences is not with him, but with others.

In the same way, a man who dates a woman because he fears solitude does not have a positive relationship with her, but rather a “negative” relationship with his own fears. She is an anxiety-avoidance mechanism, and only has “value” as a human shield against his own low self-esteem. He has the same motives as a bank robber who grabs a hostage in order to avoid capture.

Intimacy

s we take a step back from our detailed brickwork, and look at the shape of the house we are constructing, we can begin to see what it looks like as a whole.

Love requires honesty, courage, integrity and virtue, both because these traits are admirable, and also because they foster predictability and security in intimate relations.

Love does not require perfection, but honesty – particularly in relation to mistakes, since perfection creates impossible standards and inevitable frustration, and love is fundamentally about sustainable pleasure, just as nutrition and exercise are fundamentally about sustainable health and well-being.

Love requires two parties that are drawn together by an objective standard – virtue – just as science requires two parties that are drawn together by an objective standard – the scientific method – and economic interactions require two parties that are drawn together by an objective standard – the voluntary exchange of economic value.

True intimacy is driven by a delight in gaining knowledge about the other person, just as scientific knowledge is driven by a delight in gaining knowledge about the material world.

Intimacy is the natural process and result of pleasurable curiosity.

A man who loves history will enjoy learning all about history.

A woman who loves a man will enjoy learning all about him.

If a man claims to “love” history, but scorns and rejects the study of history, we would not take his claim very seriously. If a man claims to “love” exercise, but never gets off the couch, and constantly mocks athletes on television, then we know that his professions of “love” are mere narcissistic foolishness.

However, active hostility is not required to repudiate claims of “love.” Mere indifference is an effective argument against protestations of affection.

If a man says: “I love yoga,” but never takes a class, watches a video, or practices, then clearly he does not love yoga, but rather is indifferent to yoga. What he “loves” is saying “I love yoga,” rather than yoga itself.

In the same way, many people say that they like classical music, although when you hunt around their music collection, there’s not a whole lot of classical there. The reason that they say they like classical music is that they like being perceived as someone who likes classical music, because it makes them appear cultured and refined.

In other words, they do not “like” classical music, but rather “like” lying, thus confirming that they are not cultured and refined – at least in this area – but rather shallow, insecure and manipulative.

I Want!

Love is a statement: “I want.”

I want to get to know you better, I want to spend time with you, I want to share myself with you, I want to see how you will react to this or that. I want to know your thoughts and feelings.

I want to run downstairs and greet you with open arms when you come home.

I want to take care of you when you’re feeling unwell.

I want your happiness.

I want you to feel safe, protected, loved and cherished.

The list goes on and on, of course – the essential aspect of “I want” is: compared to what?

All desires are limitless; all resources are limited. This fundamental principle of economics applies equally to questions of preference and prioritization.

I can say: “I love squash,” but that does not mean that I want to play it 18 hours a day, since that would leave me injured and unable to play squash.

I can say: “I want to lose weight,” but that does not mean that I really want to lose weight, if my following statement: “I want another piece of cheesecake,” takes precedence.

I can say: “I want to be a millionaire,” but that does not mean that I’m willing to sacrifice my leisure in order to achieve that goal.

Thus preferences must always be measured relative to each other.

In the example of Bruce and Sheila at the beginning of this book, we can see their initial meeting was characterized by a form of “fusion,” wherein they developed a kind of one-dimensional “intimacy” by isolating themselves from the world, thus largely rejecting the ecosystem of competing demands. In this way, they really did not get the chance to see how they really “competed” with other priorities, which did not give them an objective way to really determine each other’s value.

I used to work as a software executive, and traveled fairly regularly. I would say to my wife: “I love spending time with you,” but that did not mean that the only thing I ever wanted to do was to spend time with her. I certainly preferred spending time with her to going to work, or on a business trip, but it was in order to retain my pleasure in her company that I felt it incumbent upon me to contribute to the household income.

Life is a balance of competing pleasures, as we all know. I have to get up early, but I want to finish watching a midnight movie. My wife is calling me for dinner, but I am right in the middle of a video game. I want to continue working on this book, but a Freedomain listener has an important question.

In the absence of outright evil and corruption, there are no particularly objective “right” answers. Should I continue working on this book, or take a call from a listener with a problem? There is no totally objective way to answer this. We do not receive medals in the afterlife for the actions we take in the here and now. No one is “taking score,” or giving us marks for right or wrong behaviours (except our conscience of course). We do not answer to an objective and conscious “higher power.”

We do have an inbuilt desire and drive for the truth, since we live in objective material reality, which consistently reinforces the objective and rational principles that define the truth.

We do have an inbuilt desire and drive for moral justifications, because all human beings feel a fundamental need to be virtuous.

We always have the choice, of course, to either be virtuous or to just define whatever we’re doing as “virtue,” and thus corrupt both ourselves and the world.

In the same way, we always have the choice to either love honourably, or to just define whatever we’re doing as “love,” and thus corrupt both ourselves and the world.

Love is a Verb…

“Love,” like “virtue,” is derived from actions, not defined by words.

A man who claims to “love” a woman, but scorns and denigrates her – even on occasion – not only does not “love” her, but rather hates her.

In the same way, a man who claims to “love” his country, and then puts on a costume and points a gun at whoever his leaders tell him to – foreign and domestic – clearly does not “love” his country, but rather “loves” violence – which is the opposite of love.

A superstitious man does not “love” God, but rather “loves” controlling others through morally poisonous fantasies.

A statist man does not “love” government, or his fellow citizens, but rather “loves” controlling others through morally poisonous fantasies.

In the example above, Wendy does not “love” her daughter, but rather “loves” managing her own anxiety by controlling her daughter’s behaviour.

Similarly, Bruce does not “love” Sheila – or vice versa – they just “love” managing their own anxieties by manipulating each others’ behaviour.

In my first book, “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion,” I argued that authority figures use morality to control us, thus affirming the power of morality – and our desire as children to be good – and then use that power to corrupt us and “justify” their own actions.

In the same way, any person who uses the word “love” to manipulate other people is acting in a highly corrupt manner.

The word “love” is used in many contexts, both within our personal relationships, and in our “larger” relationships to state, church and “morality.”

Before discussing how we can begin to undo these destructive fantasies in our own lives using the Real-Time Relationship, let us look at how these pious lies have corrupted our social, religious and political environments, so that we can understand the difficulties that we will face when we finally begin to really speak the truth.

Social Lies: Love, Power and Manipulation

In the absence of nutritional knowledge, human beings tend to eat what tastes good in the moment.

In the absence of philosophical wisdom, human beings tend to become mere “anxiety avoidance machines.”

Let us look at a few examples of this in various fields, before we see the enormously destructive impact this has on people’s personal relationships.

Religion and Anxiety

Religious mysticism, or superstition, is almost always driven by a fear of the unknown.

If we look at the example of epilepsy, we can see that the incomprehensible foaming and thrashing behaviour exhibited by epileptics during an attack can create great anxiety in others. What on earth is happening? Why is it happening? Could this happen to me?

Whenever we are confronted by something that we do not understand, we can either roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of striving to understand it – a work that will doubtless remain uncompleted in our lifetime – or we can simply make up an explanation that gets rid not of our ignorance, but of our anxiety.

Clearly, sacrificing a goat in no way affects whether or not the rains will come. However, if you can convince yourself that sacrificing a goat can indeed control the rain, the brutal ritual allows you to live with less anxiety, because you have “done something” to control your environment.

The Pitfalls of Mythology

Unfortunately, every moral illusion we create for the sake of immediate anxiety avoidance tends to harden into cultish dogmatism.

If we end up convincing ourselves that slaughtering the goat controls the rains, we are usually the one who slaughters the goat. All too often, our ability to spin comforting fantasies and kill animals becomes our profession. Our livelihood then becomes based on lies.

When this occurs – when the priestly class emerges – our greatest enemy then becomes scepticism and rational curiosity. Since we make our living by lying, anyone who starts objectively looking for the truth threatens our livelihood, our sense of virtue, and our position in the community.

If it becomes revealed that we have just made up our answers to prey upon others – and that we have provided only the illusion of security and control, to the great detriment of the community – then we are also likely to be attacked in retaliation, or banished from our community as liars and con men. We will be revealed to our children as shallow and manipulative thieves, and will be cast out into the wilderness, subject to all the whims of nature, beasts and men.

This is why mythologizing is so elementally destructive. Whenever you create a group of people who profit from lies and violence – the church and the state, respectively – you create a hardened caste whose self-interest can only be maintained through brutality and a willingness to attack virtue.

Mythology always becomes cancer.

Mythology and the Appearance of Control

Mythologizing, then, masks anxiety by creating the appearance of control.

Like any drug, this temporarily reduces anxiety in the moment, while continually escalating it in the long run.

Mythologizing is in essence the creation of an unsubstantiated link between cause and effect. Why does Bob have epilepsy? Why, because he is possessed by a demon!

Naturally, since this supposed “cause and effect” is entirely illusory, it cannot rest on its own empirical merits, but must be aggressively inflicted and defended through propaganda and force.

There is no “Church of Gravity,” which drags young children into Sunday school to repeat to them over and over that gravity exists, that gravity is real, that gravity has an effect on matter – and that the children will be sent to hell for disbelieving in gravity. Similarly, there are no “Temples of the Hot Stoves” which strive over and over to inculcate the belief in children that a hot stove will burn them if they touch it.

The reason for this, of course, is that children have direct empirical perceptions of gravity and heat – the cause-and-effect is very immediate, very testable, very powerful, perfectly consistent, and so perfectly real.

It is only when the cause-and-effect is imaginary that moral and physical aggression need to be deployed against anyone who questions it.

Statism and Anxiety

The mythology around “the state” in many ways exceeds – particularly in the modern world – the mythology that surrounds superstitious religiosity.

The question: how can human society be organized? is not answered by the state, any more than the question where did the world come from? is answered by religion.

If a man says, “My wife loves me,” and then locks her in the basement and threatens to shoot her if she tries to escape, do we believe him?

A “theory” cannot be considered “proven” if all it does is shoot anyone who disagrees with it.

In fact, any theory which requires violent defense is by any rational standard of proof utterly wrong or false to begin with.

Thus the thesis that “a state is required to organize society,” is demonstrably false, because it is not in fact a thesis at all, but rather a violently aggressive dogma.

Shooting those who disagree with you does not make you right, but rather proves that your position is wrong, corrupt and evil.

The State and Society

Since the state uses compulsion to “organize” society, it repudiates the very concept of “society,” just as rape repudiates the very concept of “love making,” and robbery repudiates the concept of “property.”

Using “the state” to answer the question of how society should be organized is morally identical to using kidnapping and imprisonment to answer the question of how to get someone to “love” you.

It is the mere illusion of an answer, rather than a real answer – and like all illusory answers, not only is it brutal in the extreme, but it also actively prevents the pursuit of true answers.

The False Answers of Statism

When people ask, “How should children be educated?” – the answer, inevitably, is: we should educate them through the state.

This is not an answer at all.

We may as well answer the question how should people get married? with the answer: we should force them to cohabitate at gunpoint.

However, the moment that force is used, voluntary descriptions must be abandoned.

If I steal your wallet at gunpoint, I cannot logically call the transfer of money “charity.”

If we force people to get “married,” it is not marriage, but rather institutionalized rape.

If we force children to get “educated,” it is not education but rather institutionalized indoctrination.

In the same way, if we bully, force, manipulate or threaten children to get them to believe in God, what results is not belief, but frightened conformity, which can also be termed brain-rape or brainwashing.

And the same is true of love.

Love and Anxiety

True knowledge reduces our anxiety, because true knowledge allows us to predict consequences, accurately manage cause-and-effect, and thus gain some objective measure of control in our lives.

Thus, when we correctly view epilepsy as a neurological disorder, we can predict that attacks will occur in the future, we can examine the causes of these attacks and develop medications to prevent recurrence – or at least manage the symptoms.

Even if we cannot control epilepsy, understanding that it is a neurological disorder at least reduces our anxiety with regards to the unknown. Even if we cannot turn on the light, once we understand that the “giant skeletal hand” scratching at our window is in fact a tree branch, our terror is sharply reduced.

On the other hand, if we believe that epileptic attacks are the result of demonic possession or invasion, then we will take the epileptic to a priest, who will sprinkle water and chant words, which have absolutely no effect on the cause of the attack, and prevent rather than provide understanding.

Trial by Fire

In the Middle Ages, there was a ritual known as “trial by fire,” wherein a person accused of a serious crime would be forced to reach into a fire and pull out a metal bar – being terribly burned in the process. If the burns became infected, then the person’s guilt was considered established, since infection was a sign of moral corruption, inflicted by God only upon the guilty.

Of course, the presence or absence of infection has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s guilt or innocence, but is mere random chance. Inherent in the “trial by fire” was a complete understanding of this, insofar as the person had to be burned in order for the infection to possibly occur – in other words, they did not wait for a spontaneous infection to afflict a healthy person.

We may feel that we are far above this primitive brutality, but of course we are not. Governments the world over – including the United States, and other “civilized” Western nations – regularly torture “confessions” out of people. This can occur through “extraordinary rendition” programs, wherein people are kidnapped, flown to Egypt or Syria, and tortured or murdered – but it also happens countless times daily, when people are offered reduced sentences or plea bargains, in return for “confessions.”

During the Salem witch trials, women were tortured into “confessing” that they were witches – and then they were offered a quick death if they would name other witches in their “coven.” Dazed, bleeding, broken, mutilated, they coughed up the names of anyone they could think of, in order to gain the sweet release of death.

In our times, such “confessions” are also extracted through the threat of torture – since modern prisons in every country are certainly torture pits of brutality and rape – in return for “testimony” against others.

This “testimony” usually results from a person facing years or decades in prison naming whoever he can in order to reduce his sentence, and has nothing to do with establishing any sort of reasonable innocence or guilt. These “named” people are then picked up, and the process continues.

The only difference is that in the medieval “trial by fire,” at least you had a chance of not developing an infection.

Through this process, the number of crimes that are genuinely prevented is far outstripped by the number of crimes certainly committed, through the sending of innocent and terrified people to the brutal rape rooms of modern prisons.

Furthermore, since the government can invent any number of “crimes” and “criminals,” this sick and evil process both allows the government to claim that it is really good at catching criminals, and also terrifies the population through the invention of a “criminal underclass” that citizens believe they need the government to protect them from.

False Knowledge and Crime

This whole process is a vicious example of how “false knowledge” (i.e. you have committed this “crime”) both enables and exacerbates real crimes. By creating “facts” through the threat of multiyear torture, only the appearance of guilt is established.

We may as well imagine that the Salem trials were really about finding witches. While many women certainly did “confess” to being witches, that was only because they preferred a relatively quick death to the endless tortures inflicted on them by superstitious fanatics.

We can see countless other examples as we look across our intellectual landscape, from the bitchy and greedy fear-mongering of “global warming” to the filthy and viciously corrupt fear-mongering of the “War on Terror” to the exhausted and numbly-repeated fear-mongering of the “War on Drugs,” “War on Poverty,” “War on Illiteracy,” etc.

Whenever a disaster strikes a statist or religious society, the brutalized mob’s first instinct is not to find the root cause, but rather to identify a scapegoat.

New York, 2001

For example, in the case of the attacks on New York in 2001, everybody’s first desire was for vengeance, not knowledge.

This is exactly the same reaction as the superstitious desire to “attack” the demon that is causing epilepsy, rather than struggling to understand the root causes of epilepsy, and working to alleviate them.

If we refuse to understand the root causes of epilepsy, but rather just attack the epileptics, anyone suffering from epilepsy will do anything he can to shield knowledge of his symptoms from everyone else. In the same way, the president of Iran can, with a straight face, say, “We have no homosexuals in our country.” Given that homosexuals are regularly tortured and killed in Iran, it hardly seems surprising that they would be a challenge to find.

When epileptics are attacked, and then the symptoms of epilepsy mysteriously “vanish,” the attackers generally raise a cheer and toast their own effectiveness.

However, all these monsters have done is to make the study of epilepsy highly dangerous. They have eliminated the “symptoms,” but their definition of epilepsy as an “evil possession” simply makes anyone who strives to understand it scientifically “evil” as well, and thus subject to attack.

In this way, not only do they merely eliminate the symptoms of epilepsy, but they ensure that epilepsy will continue – and likely increase – by attacking anyone who displays the symptoms, as well as anyone who investigates those symptoms scientifically.

Just as refusing to investigate the aetiology of epilepsy causes one to act in a way that does nothing to alleviate the problem of epilepsy, refusing to understand the root causes of “terrorist” attacks does nothing to alleviate the problems of violence.

If fact, it only makes those problems worse.

Empathizing with Vengeance

If we are attacked, it is generally very easy to understand why.

We are attacked for exactly the same reasons that we want to attack others.

When we want to go and bomb Afghanistan after 9/11, we fully understand the mindset of the “terrorists” already.

To understand why people would want to fly planes into buildings, all we need to do is understand why we want to bomb Afghanistan.

Since we want to bomb Afghanistan because we have been attacked, we can then easily surmise that planes must have been flown into our buildings because we have attacked others.

It’s really not that complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of effort to avoid this simple and basic understanding.

The Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – serves us well here. “Others are doing to us as we have done to them.” (I use the word “we” here very loosely of course, referring rather to the foreign policy of the US government. Also, please note that I use the word “policy” here equally loosely, referring rather to its terrorist attacks on foreigners.)

To understand the “terrorism” of foreigners, all we have to do is understand our own response to “terrorism.”

When “terrorism” is inflicted upon us – paramilitary attacks without a declaration of war – we have a desire to lash out and murder others.

Thus since we wish to attack when we are murdered, we must have been attacked because we have murdered, since Muslims do not belong to another species, and human beings have similar reactions to similar stimuli.

How long does this take to figure out? Not very long at all.

A few minutes on the Internet will reveal a massive bombing campaign throughout Iraq in the 1990s, conducted by the British and American military, which resulted in the economic decimation of the middle class and the physical destruction through malnutrition and illness of upwards of half a million Iraqis.

Going further, it does not take very long to find out that the United States has tens of thousands of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia – and it also does not take an enormous leap of imagination to understand how this must make certain Saudis feel, given that many Americans would doubtless find it highly objectionable to have Muslim nuclear weapons stationed outside Washington, pointed at the White House.

Also, the US still occupies Japan, more than a half-century after conquering it, and has 700+ military bases throughout the world, and extracts billions of dollars from foreign governments to pay for these occupations – like any other criminal shakedown.

Going just a little bit further, it does not take very long to find out that America subsidizes the Israeli military to the tune of several billion dollars a year. Regardless of how one views the division down the Gaza Strip and the creation of the occupied territories, it certainly is the case that America finances the oppression of Muslims through the Israeli occupation.

Given that America was founded through the violent overthrow of a foreign “dictatorship,” it should not be hard for Americans to figure out that when you cause the deaths of those in another group by the hundreds of thousands – particularly children – and when you station “infidel” troops on the “holy land” of a highly volatile and superstitious gang of oil-rich thugs – and finally, when you subsidize a group that is viciously oppressing members of the same volatile gang – that reprisals, or “blowback,” will be inevitable.

Americans make up stories about how the Muslims “hate us for our freedoms” – and then condemn Islamic societies for their lack of freedoms. When I ask Americans if they hate Islamic dictatorships – and they say, “yes” – when I then ask them why they are not out committing acts of terrorism against those Islamic dictatorships, they just stare at me blankly, as if I were insane.

In other words, the blatant conflict between, “They attack us because they hate us in the abstract,” and, “I hate them in the abstract, but I would never attack them,” must be repressed, like all mythologies.

Hellish Reciprocity

If they come to kill us, and then we want to kill them, then logically they must have come to kill us because we have already been killing them.

If Americans stare around in bewilderment, asking “Why do they hate us?” the first person to ask, of course, is the person who attacked them.

If I sit minding my own business in a restaurant and a man comes up and slaps me across the face, my first question would be: “Why did you slap me?”

If the man says, “Because here are the pictures of you sleeping with my wife!” then I cannot claim to be ignorant of why he has hit me. I may oppose his use of force or consider it an unjust response to my actions, but I cannot claim to be ignorant of his motives.

On the other hand, if the man says: “I slapped you because you killed my entire family,” then any vengeance that I would take would seem wildly unjust to everyone else, since the wrong I had done this man far outstripped the wrong he had done me in return.

People always ignore, repress or bypass questions for which they already have answers that they do not like, or which do not serve their needs.

If the man in the restaurant slaps me, I can only take vengeance upon him if I claim that I have never done anything to harm him.

If he claims that his slap was a retaliation for my far more grievous attack upon his family, then I must not respond to that accusation in any way – neither to deny nor affirm – but must continue to protest my complete ignorance as to his motives for attacking me.

Only by ignoring his motives can I justify my vengeance.

In the case of the September attacks, this “bewilderment” reached truly ridiculous proportions. The man who claimed to be behind the attacks openly stated that his three reasons for attacking America were exactly those described above – the US occupation of Saudi Arabia, the funding of Israel, and the blockade of Iraq,

He repeated over and over that his attack was a retaliation for the far more egregious American attacks upon his fellow Muslims.

Yet still Americans claimed that they had “no idea” why they were so hated – or, that they were hated for their “virtues” – which is even more offensive and provocative.

If a man rapes a woman and then claims that she is fabricating charges against him, because he is just so “wonderful and loving,” then he is egregiously and provocatively adding insult to injury. By claiming that she is reacting in rage and hatred to his benevolence, love and virtue, he is not only rejecting the fact that he brutalized her sexually, but he is also claiming that she is emotionally corrupt and viciously anti-virtue.

Backup Lies

Of course, after the mythology of “we have no idea why we were attacked” is invented, a secondary mythology must also be created, in order to protect the first.

As described earlier, false cause-and-effect “relationships” such as “sacrificing a goat = good rains” must always be defended through the use of emotional and/or physical brutality.

After the September attacks, the backup mythology – the “thug” story – was that any attempt to understand the root causes of the attacks could only be motivated by sympathy for the attackers, and a desire to justify their murders.

This is all pure, vicious nonsense – the direct equivalent of accusing an oncologist who studies how to prevent a recurrence of cancer of being a big fan of the cancer you already have.

Clearly, someone who wishes to get to the root causes of an affliction cannot “cure” those who already have that affliction, any more than an anti-smoking campaign can reverse lung cancer.

It is precisely because lung cancer is largely irreversible that prevention is far more valuable than attempting a “cure.”

Love and Ego Identification

Why is it that the average American would be so resistant to discovering the truth about the September attacks?

What would it cost him emotionally if he discovered that those who claim to represent “his government” had done unspeakably evil things, which had brought about unspeakably evil retaliations?

If the average American reads about a Mafia hit-man who gets “whacked” in return, or some gang banger found shot dead in a gutter, does he immediately rush to the defence of the Mafia, or the gang?

Of course not.

If a mugger gets shot, the average American most likely shrugs and says, “Well, don’t mug people!” If a hit-man gets whacked, we often feel a grim, unpleasant but generally-inevitable sense of justice.

Ah, the average American might say, but in the case of the September attacks, the people who were killed were not the people responsible for the decisions of the leaders.

This is very true, of course – but it is equally true for the Iraqis, who starved and died under an embargo that supposedly resulted directly from the decisions of their leader – Saddam Hussein.

Furthermore, the Iraqis who died had no chance whatsoever to change their leader or to affect their political system in any way, shape or form. The people who died in the World Trade Center were educated, affluent, well-spoken and old enough to vote. This does not mean that they brought about their own deaths, of course, but it does mean that if the standard is brought forward that people should not be killed for the actions of their leaders, then we must have more sympathy for the helpless Iraqis, who lived in a dictatorship, than the adults of New York, who lived in a democracy.

Furthermore, it was the Iraqi children who suffered and died the most under the UK/US blockade. Should we primarily blame children for the actions of a dictator? Would it have been worse for the Muslim hijackers to target Disneyland?

Finally, what is the average Muslim to make of the simple and brutal reality that, even after the “reasons” given for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned out to be totally fraudulent, the sitting President was returned to office with a clear majority of the popular vote? What could it mean that, after committing a genocide against Muslims, Bush won the Presidency more decisively in 2004 than he did in 2000?

Are those who vote responsible for the decisions of their leaders?

The “Stockholm Syndrome”

The only way to truly unravel this unholy knot is to understand that the average American feels a very strong ego identification with “his” leader, “his” government, and the political ruling class as a whole.

Why is that?

Well, of course it is partly due to the endless propaganda that every citizen of every country is endlessly subjected to, particularly in government schools.

However, there is a far more central reason that we rush to the defence of our leaders, which has great ramifications for our own personal relationships as well.

Sympathy and Integrity

What would it mean to have sympathy for the victims of our own governments?

What would it mean to dispassionately survey the political and military landscape of the past generation or so, and realize the degree to which our own governments have committed unspeakable crimes and genocides throughout the world?

What would it mean?

The reason that we avoid knowing evil is not because we wish to avoid that knowledge, but rather because we wish to avoid another knowledge which is far more dangerous to us.

Imagine a prisoner who wakes up to a silent and empty prison, with the door of his cell very slightly ajar.

He calls out, but no guards come.

He rattles the bars of his cage, but no other prisoners respond, and no other sound can be heard.

Everyone has left. He is alone in an empty prison.

If we imagine that we are this prisoner, can we picture how terrifying it would be for us to actually try to open the door of our cell?

If the door opens, we at least have the chance to escape.

If the door is locked, however – ah, then we will suffer the agonies of thirst and starvation for days, and die a terrible death, alone in our locked cell.

With the stakes so high, how would we feel about actually trying to open the door of our cell?

The reason that we would avoid trying to open the door of our cage is not because we were afraid of the door being locked, but rather that we were afraid of dying of thirst and starvation, over days, agonizingly slowly.

By avoiding the door, we are avoiding the knowledge of our death.

And – the more certain that we are that the door is locked – and thus that we will die - the more terrified we are of trying to open it.

In the same way, we flock to defend our leaders, because if we objectively survey their actions and realize the violence and evil that they have committed, we are led to some terrifying and terrible conclusions about the world that we actually live in.

Democracy?

The vast majority of people in the world did not want America to invade Iraq – and even the majority of people in America did not want the invasion, or if they did it was only because of propaganda.

Yet still, the invasion occurred – even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September attacks, had no contacts with Al Qaeda, and did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

What does this say about the true nature of the society that we live in?

If our leaders are capable of ordering a blockade that results in the deaths of half a million Iraqis, what does that say about their capacity for ethical action?

What does that say about their capacity for empathy?

What does that say about their moral values?

What are we avoiding when we do not ask these questions?

Furthermore, if our leaders perform these unspeakably evil actions and then profess “bewilderment” when their victims strike back, then clearly our leaders fully understand the ethics of “virtuous self-defence.”

Thus they cannot be mad – or at least, not morally mad.

If they are not morally mad, but perform evil actions, then they are truly evil.

And these are the people that we give our children to, to become “educated.”

In a democracy, if the leaders are evil, it is either because the people are evil, or because it is not really a democracy.

If we live in a true democracy, and the majority of people elect evil sociopaths as their leaders, then clearly the majority of people are evil.

If the majority of people are evil, and their leaders are also evil, then the attacks of September become understandable – it is just one Mafia gang attacking another in retaliation for a previous attack. There is no honor, no reasonable self-righteousness – it is just one more dirty murder following another dirty murder.

In this case, retaliation becomes impossible to justify in moral terms – and so the cycle is broken.

If, however, the people are not evil, but their leaders are evil – as surely they are – then clearly the leaders do not represent the will of the people, and thus society cannot be called a “democracy.”

If the majority of the people are good, but the leaders are evil, then clearly it is immoral to have any sort of allegiance to this corrupt and exploitive gang of political thugs.

If we saw innocent bystanders being gunned down in a drive-by gangland shooting, would we rush to the defence of the shooters?

If this type of murder occurs in a neighbourhood – dozens of people being cut down in gangland shootouts – we would tend to get angry at the gang that provoked the retaliation, not flock to their support, grab weapons and continue to escalate the war.

In other words, we would identify with the victims, not with the perpetrators.

However, in the case of the September attacks, the average American did not identify with the victims but rather with the leaders.

Again, why?

Morality and Victimhood

To start, let’s trace what happens when the average American begins to apply objective moral judgments to the actions of those involved in Christian/Muslim/Jewish violence.

Clearly, ordering the death of another is immoral. Equally clearly, in terms of ordering the deaths of other religious groups, the Christians started the cycle of violence, at least in the 20^th century. There were no Muslim attacks on America in the 19^th century even though America was far freer in many ways in those days.

The Christian attacks on the Muslim world continued throughout the 20^th century through the creation of Iraq by the British out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, and escalating in the American arming of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, followed by the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s.

Thus in terms of “who started it,” clearly it was the Christians – initially the British, and to a smaller degree the French, and most recently the Americans.

Since ordering the deaths of other people is evil, then clearly this evil was first committed by the Western Christian leaders.

Since Westerners pride themselves on their “democratic institutions” – particularly as opposed to the dictatorial Islamic theocracies – clearly the Western citizens of those democracies have a far greater capacity to control the actions of their leaders, relative to the average Muslim.

Since in a democracy the actions of the leaders must represent the will of the people, if those leaders perform evil actions, then the people are to some degree at least responsible for that evil.

If I give a gun to a murderer knowing that he is about to kill someone, cheer him on when he does kill that person, and then give him more bullets right afterwards, then clearly I am complicit in his crimes.

Now, if the attacks of September 2001 were evil – as doubtless they were – but we apply an objective moral standard, then clearly our own leaders are far more evil than the leaders of the attackers, since they have been responsible for hundreds of times more murders than the attackers.

If our own leaders are evil, then we must attempt to prevent them from performing their evil actions.

If we live in a true democracy, then we should easily be able to prevent our leaders from performing evil actions.

In other words, the door to our cage should be unlocked.

Yet – we do not try to prevent our leaders from performing evil actions.

Even after the manipulations and falsehoods of George W. Bush were fully exposed – even in the mainstream media – he still won the popular vote with a margin of several million.

Since he had started a war based on false information, why was he not voted out?

The Knowledge We Avoid

He was not voted out because the people did not want to see that the war would continue.

The average American does not want to find out that no matter who he puts in government, the evils of the state will continue.

The average American does not want to find out that his cell door is truly and irrevocably locked.

The average American – like all of us – knows deep in his heart that he has absolutely no control over his government.

Deep down, we all know that the rapes, murders, tortures, predations, corruptions, thefts and brutality committed in the name of “the state” will continue as long as “the state” does.

We can sooner alter the orbit of the moon with our minds than control the actions of our leaders.

It is not knowledge of evil that we are avoiding, but knowledge of our own subjugation – of our own helplessness, of our own enslavement.

The moment that we actually emotionally understand, accept and truly feel the nature of our enslavement, we will find ourselves compelled to action.

And it is that action that we fear – not because it involves violence or physical danger, but rather because we know it will trigger the undoing of our entire world as we know it.

That is what is truly called “taking the red pill.”

Implosion

The moment that we begin applying objective moral values to our own life – and to the actions of those around us – we immediately step into another kind of world – or rather, step out of a prison that is only visible from the outside.

So when we question the murderous desire for retribution after the September attacks, we begin to understand that we are surrounded by people who attack anyone who speaks the truth.

If we are surrounded by people who attack the truth, then we are in fact surrounded by corrupt and brutal individuals.

If we are surrounded by corrupt individuals, then the corruption of our leaders becomes more understandable.

The corruption of our leaders becomes more understandable when we realize that we are living in a world of pious, frightened and brutal liars.

In this way, the “country” that we formerly claimed to “love” is revealed as a frightened, tyrannical and abusive “family” that showers empty goodies on blank conformists and attacks anyone who asks rational and moral questions.

In other words, the moment that we speak the truth, we find out that we were only “loved” because we were silent, stupid, obedient – and productive.

We find out that we were only “tolerated” as a means to an end, in the same way that a farmer “tolerates” his cows, because he wants milk – and meat.

The Humiliation of Knowledge

This knowledge is exquisitely and almost unbearably humiliating.

When we emerge from the “matrix” of mythology, we look back and see…

…that we licked the boots of those who kicked us. That we sang the praises of those who harvested us. That we were slaves who cheered the virtue of being owned.

And – the most terrifying realization of all...

That we are far more afraid of our fellow slaves than we are of our masters.

Once this realization sinks in, we are temporarily lost in a fog of limbo… We cannot be masters, but are no longer slaves. We cannot sup at the bloody tables of the elites, but neither are we welcome any more in the cages of the slaves, to fight over scraps and call it “plenty.”

This is the land between the stars, between the past and the present, where the fertility of the future takes root.

And it can be a very, very lonely place to be.

And it is this exile, this knowledge, that we are avoiding at all times.

The truth does set us free – at the cost of revealing to us that we are all slaves.

And – that our fellow slaves hate us most of all.

Anxiety Avoidance and Relationships

W

hat does the above analysis have to do with our personal relationships?

It has been my experience that it is far easier to get people to understand personal topics in an abstract context first.

As the long-time listeners at Freedomain well know, I began my series on personal and political liberty with long discussions of anarchistic models of social organization, as well as abstract economic, theological and political analyses. It was only after 70 or so podcasts that I began to dip into personal topics, and only in the late 100s did I really begin to zero in on personal liberty, particularly with the series 180 to 183 – “Freedom” Parts 1-4.

Most people who are interested in political liberty know that some rather terrible things have occurred since the attacks on New York. Some have gone as far as saying that these attacks were an “inside job,” which I do not believe, but you do not need to go that far in order to understand that those who wield political, military or mercantilist economic power only stand to gain when a nation is “attacked,” particularly when a nightmarish Orwellian “endless war” can be invented.

In other words, if you really want to hurt yourself, you do not need to stab yourself: you simply need to keep poking a bear with a stick.

Most of my writing and thinking as a philosopher has been focused on answering two fundamental questions:

1. Why has libertarianism failed so consistently throughout history?
2. Given that we can have no practical effect on a nuclear-armed state, how can we best work to bring about political liberty without compromising our personal liberty?

The answer to the first question has been the subject of many podcasts on the family; the entire answer to the second question is obviously beyond the scope of this book, but I will say that once you understand the principles of the Real-Time Relationship, you will have taken an enormous leap forward in understanding how to free yourself personally, and how it can be applied politically as well.

If we distil our analysis of the September attacks as described earlier, we can come to some very valuable conclusions, which can really help us understand the nature and challenges of our personal relationships – as well as why we spend so much time and energy avoiding the truth.

The Principles of Intimacy

First of all, I can guarantee you that examining your personal relationships in the light of what is being discussed in this book will be enormously costly.

If you continue, and move beyond the theoretical stage and actually understand these principles personally – whether you end up putting them into practice or not – it is likely that very few of your existing relationships will survive this transition.

I just think that you should know that up front.

Philosophy is not a toy – and in particular, moral philosophy is the most powerful force on the planet.

If you are going to bring this amazing power to bear on your relationships, then very few of them will actually survive. I can tell you that those that do survive will be greater than anything you can imagine at the moment. In other words, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, or “hope” at the bottom of this Pandora’s Box.

Realities

First of all, I fully accept and believe you when you say that every relationship that you are involved in at the moment is based on virtue.

None of us get up in the morning, brush our teeth, look in the mirror and say: “my wife/parents/friends etc. are evil!”

We may get angry at them from time to time, but we do not truly or consistently believe that they are full of malevolent intent, hell bent on our destruction, and selfish to the core.

If people in our lives behave in a manner that cannot possibly be construed as virtuous or benevolent, we have an endless stream of clichés at our disposal with which to wish away our wounds and knowledge of corruption:

• “He did the best he could!”
• “His heart is in the right place!”
• “She comes from a different generation, that’s just all she knows…”
• “I guess I’m just a bit oversensitive.”
• “That’s just his way!”
• “Oh, that’s more prevalent in his culture.”
• “He never acts with any ill intent, he’s just… brusque.”
• “She’s under a lot of stress right now.”

In other words, we explain away non-virtuous actions with self-medicating stories. We accept immoral behaviour by redefining it as “well-intentioned imperfection,” and then proudly wear the medal of “virtuous tolerance.”

In other words, as described in Part 1, we redefine our cowardice as “courage.”

This is very similar to the way that people view their government. While getting upset and frustrated at some evidence of incompetent, scandalous or immoral behaviour, the “value” of government in the abstract, or as an institution remains not just unquestioned – but unquestionable. “A few bad apples don’t spoil the barrel,” we say, or, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Thus we have a seemingly ineradicable habit of believing that those people we have relationships with are virtuous or have our best interests at heart, but we will do almost anything to avoid applying rational moral principles to their actions.

In the same way, theologians claim to have “knowledge” of the existence and will of some sort of deity. This “knowledge” is always presented as objective – as differentiated from their opinions – however, when any sort of objective principles are applied to this knowledge, it completely evaporates, and is revealed as, after all, a mere opinion.

This is an example of a meal that this book will take off your personal “myth menu” forever: having your cake and eating it too.

Virtue as “Objective Opinion”

People always claim that their relationships – with their parents, friends, governments and gods – are based on virtue. However, when you attempt to ask them how they know this and what principles they have applied to derive such objective knowledge – since virtue is surely not just an opinion – they immediately and instantaneously shy away, or become aggressive.

If I claim to have created a medicine that will prevent the spread of HIV – a pronouncement greeted with cheers of gratitude – and then, when a population takes this medicine, what results is the greatest HIV plague that the world has ever seen, will people’s gratitude for my medicine continue unabated?

In the same way, patriots say: “I love my country because my country is the best!”

“Best” in this case always means most moral. Americans talk about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers and so on. In other words, they talk about how the American system limits the power of government, and how right it was for the United States to break away from England in the 18^th century.

When you then ask these patriots how it is reasonably possible to love a system that was designed to limit the power of government that has produced the most powerful government, with the greatest and most destructive military, that the world has ever known, they just shy away or become aggressive.

Furthermore, if it was right to fight against the British state in the 18^th century, when it was imposing minor taxes and duties, and threatening to impose a fiat currency, how can it be possible to love the American state in the 21^st century, with its crushing tax burdens, ridiculously overinflated fiat currency, massive national debt, monstrously imperialistic foreign policy and so on? That’s like saying that you hugely respect the virtue and courage of a woman who leaves her husband because he doesn’t take out the garbage, but that a woman should stay with a husband who half-strangles her to death every other week.

Also, if Americans love their country because the Bill of Rights and the Constitution limit the power of government, then surely they must love their country less and less, as government power grows greater and greater.

If I love sobriety and hate alcoholism, and when I married my wife she rarely drank, surely I will love her less when she becomes a raging alcoholic, hiding gin in the Listerine bottle for her morning “gargle.”

If I say that I love sobriety and hate alcoholism, but claim that I love my wife equally after she transitions from teetotaler to raging alcoholic, then clearly I am just making up criteria by which I claim to “love” her.

God is Good?

In the same way, when you talk to Christians – or any religious people – and hear from them that God is good, it is reasonable to ask them: “How do you know?” – particularly because most theologies include a deceptive devil as well, and apparently it’s always good to know the difference, to avoid being fooled into worshipping the wrong deity.

If they say: “God is good because that is written in the Bible,” then it’s worth asking them whether they believe that the Bible is the Word of God. Naturally, they will say yes.

In this case, we basically have an autobiography in which the writer claims to be virtuous. In other words, a “claim to virtue” is the equivalent of virtue itself.

If “crazy eyes” Charles Manson scratches “I am virtuous” on his prison wall using the tooth of another prisoner, does that make Charles Manson virtuous?

There were many “authorized” Soviet biographies of Joseph Stalin that claimed he was the greatest and most virtuous man who ever lived. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler also makes great claims about his own virtue, and divine mission, and piety, and obedience to God and so on.

In other words, a self-proclamation of virtue does not prove virtue any more than repeating the words “I am rich” magically creates gold in your hand.

Thus the “virtue” of a supernatural being cannot result from its own self-proclamation, but must exist relative to some other objective standard.

A scientific theory is not “proven” because its author says so, but rather relative to the objective standard of the scientific method, which is to say relative to empirical reality. A compass measures “North,” not just me yelling the word “North!”

In this way, the “virtue” of a supernatural being must be determined relative to an objective standard of virtue.

“What, then,” I always ask the superstitious at this point, “is the objective standard by which you measure the virtue of your deity?”

If the response comes back: “The 10 Commandments,” then clearly, since one of them is: “Thou shalt not kill,” I always ask if this supernatural being has ever willfully caused the death of a human being.

Naturally, any honest Bible reader has to answer in the affirmative.

We can go through the same process with other commonly-accepted moral propositions, such as “rape is evil,” “slavery is immoral,” “child abuse is unacceptable,” and so on. If we find that the “holy” words of this supernatural being approve of – or even excuse – evils such as rape, slavery and child abuse, then clearly either these things are moral, or the deity is not.

Inevitably, the superstitious cultist you are talking to will find other, more pressing matters to attend to, rather than examining the “virtue” of his own fantasy sky ghost.

I myself would not be able to find any topic more important, more essential for my own virtue, well-being and happiness, than establishing the moral rightness of a being that I loved and worshiped – particularly if my theological model included the existence of an evil and deceptive counter-deity, such as Satan.

If you heard on the news that the medicine you were taking for a minor ailment had a 50% chance of containing a fatal poison, would you shrug and continue to take that medicine, and claim that you had more pressing matters to attend to than figuring out whether it would kill you or not?

Of course not.

When the superstitious claim that they have “more important matters to attend to” than determining the virtue of the being they worship, clearly they have no interest in virtue, either in themselves or others – or in their deity.

Not having any real interest in virtue is not in itself particularly problematic – oysters doubtless do not ponder ethical abstractions, yet we would not call them evil – however, understanding the value and beauty of virtue to the degree that you attempt to pass off your own beliefs as virtuous – and then scamper away in fear or anger whenever the topic of moral principles arises – this behaviour is morally vile, and utterly corrupt.

Ethics in the Service of Evil

In the earlier example of the New York attacks, we understood that the moral stance of victimization was essential to enable the victimization of others.

Americans – and in particular the American government – had to propagate the mythology that the attacks were utterly unprovoked, stimulated only by the malevolent evil of the attackers, and were directed at America solely as a result of America’s “virtue.”

America’s capacity to sustain this mad fiction was a truly staggering “achievement.” The leader of the attackers clearly stated, in factual terms, the crimes that America had committed in terms of foreign policy. No sane human being could deny that American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, or that the Anglo-American sanctions against Iraq had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, or that billions of dollars of aid were not flowing from Washington to Tel Aviv.

These were all facts, which were not even mentioned, let alone discussed or repudiated.

This does not mean that we must necessarily agree that the actions of the American government justified the attacks on New York. It does mean, however, that the mantra “we have no idea why they attacked us” is a complete falsehood. We may violently disagree with the moral justifications for the attacks, but the attackers were very clear as to why they attacked.

The reason that these simple explanations went instantly and irrevocably down the “memory hole” is that they threatened to bring the question of moral principles to bear on the interaction, in a simple one-two punch:

1. If their attacks on us are unjustified, then our far more egregious attacks on them were also unjustified. (If they are evil, we are far more evil.)
2. If our egregious attacks on them were justified, then their muted response against us is even more justified (If we are good, they are more good.)

The only way that the second premise could be justified is if excessive murder is considered “better” than a muted response – in other words, they are less moral than us only because they murdered fewer of us than we did of them. (This would be a difficult moral premise to argue for without openly bursting into sulphurous flames.)

Ethical Attacks

Thus, we can see that as a species we have a very strong tendency – I would say due to how we are raised, rather than what we are – to justify our immoral actions through appeals to morality, which is the mind-bending corruption that always threatens to drown the world in blood.

Also, as we can see in the above example, in essence we justify our actions according to moral principles because we want to commit immoral actions.

Because we want to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, we must pretend that we are the innocent victims of an unprovoked attack.

In other words, the end is evil; the means is false ethical “justifications.”

In this way, the power of morality is enslaved to the service of evil.

Morality thus has such astounding power not only because it creates our capacity for virtue, but also because it creates our capacity for evil.

It truly is a double-edged sword. Evil is impossible without moral justification. This is why endless propaganda is heaped upon the breaking minds of children by the state in terms of education, by religion in terms of indoctrination, and by families in terms of hypocritical moral “instruction.”

The reason that philosophy is so essential is that if we don’t use it, it is used against us in the service of evil to enable the murder and enslavement – literally – of billions.

There is a gun in the room called “ethics,” and either we take it up and fight for our freedom, or we surrender it to evildoers and remain their prisoners forever.

Warning Signs

One of the greatest warning signs of an impending attack is hearing a compelling “moral mythology” spilling out from someone’s lips.

For instance, it is impossible to listen to Hitler’s ranting oratory about the evils of the Slavic and Jewish races, and the need for defence of the Fatherland without understanding that these “moral” theories were the real weapons that he wielded – the true motive power of the war machine he launched across Europe, North Africa and Russia.

In the same way, when you hear Americans saying: “Here we were, as a country, minding our own business, when out of the blue, these goddamn Muslims attacked us for no reason!” you know that these words are mere preludes to evil.

These kinds of fantasy tales are what truly slips the “safety” off on the revolver. The immortal line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter (first performed for Hitler's birthday in 1933): “Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!” (‘When I hear “culture,” I release the safety catch on my Browning [revolver pistol]!’) – resonates because it contains a fundamental truth.

“Culture” is a necessary prerequisite for violence.

In other words, violence – particularly institutional violence – requires false moral justifications – that culture is, in its essence, a set of ethical mythologies.

Ethical Mythologies

Ethical mythologies are moral fairy tales created and inflicted through repetition, social praise and attacks, which are useful to those in power because they justify the extension of their power over the individual.

The table below lists some common social mythologies of the Western world, and the translation of those theories into practice.

Myth	Moral	Result
The Great Depression was the result of free-market capitalism.	Without government control of the economy, massive disasters result.	Increased government control over the economy.
The free market system was only saved by the start of World War II.	The free market profits from the murder of millions.	Increased government control over the economy – particularly the “evil corporations.”
Without government schools, children – particularly poor children – would remain uneducated.	Societies as a whole – particularly parents – care nothing about poor children – only the government does.	Near-total control over the indoctrination of children for almost 15 formative years.
Democracy is the ideal political system.	You control the government.	The government controls you.
The Civil War in the United States was fought to free the slaves.	Private citizens and the free market profited from slavery; only the government could free the slaves.	Massive increases in the power of the federal government.
If Western governments had not fought Nazism, we’d all be speaking German right now.	Governments are essential for protecting freedom.	Governments destroy freedom.
Governments must control the money supply; otherwise there would be wild economic instability.	The government has your best interests at heart; voluntary private interactions are exploitive.	Wild economic instability, massive national debts and endless inflation.
Governments must intervene to provide medical care for their citizens.	Doctors will rob you blind. You will die of disease in the gutter.	Massive increases in the price of health care, utter dependence upon the State in medical matters.

As we can see, all of these cultural mythologies are put forward prior to massive expansions of state power – in fact, the net increase in violence that results from expanded state power is only possible because these moral “justifications” are put forward.

When you examine culture in its essence, it is an endless series of false and destructive moral positions inflicted upon children through repetition, social ostracism, and teacher, peer and parental hostility.

Culture is a form of slave programming wherein knee-jerk emotional defences are inflicted upon the natural personality, which cause people to automatically cough up moral justifications for their enslavement – without thought, without evidence, without rationality, without basis – and to their endless detriment.

Cultural Programming and Predictability

When you bring up the coercive nature of government to your fellow citizens, the responses that you will receive are utterly predictable.

“Taxation is force,” you say – and hear the exact same arguments back, every single time:

• It’s not force because we get to vote!
• It’s not force because we have the choice to leave!
• It’s not force because no one has ever pointed a gun in my face!
• It’s not force because I’m happy to pay! – etc.

Culture is nothing more – or less – than a series of moral lies told to children, the purpose of which is to get them to happily lick the boots of their oppressors.

If slaves perceive themselves as the equals of their masters, the relationship becomes simply one of physical dominance – which the masters can never win, since by definition they must be greatly outnumbered by their slaves (otherwise, being a master would scarcely be economically productive!).

Since the masters are so outnumbered by the slaves, they cannot rule by force alone – this was even truer in the past, before weapons of mass destruction, when a knight could never stand against ten determined peasants, and a slave-owner had to sleep at some point.

Thus physical dominance alone cannot be used to create and maintain a slave population. Certainly, the threat of physical violence is always required, but it must be approved of by the slaves in order to remain economically efficient and effective.

Culture is an economically-convenient set of ethical fictions that lower the total cost of ownership for using force against innocent individuals. It is, fundamentally, what creates and enables hegemonic and hierarchical power structures.

Thus you must get the slaves to believe amongst themselves that slavery is:

1. Not in fact slavery.
2. For their own good.
3. A moral ideal.
4. And that all possibilities other than slavery would result in endless evil and destruction.

Such is the power of morality that if you can program children to revere slavery as a moral ideal, they will never even think of becoming free.

Define freedom as “slavery,” and slavery as “freedom,” and not only will your slaves never even think of becoming free, but they will in fact attack any other slave for even talking about freedom.

It is the base tragedy of our species that the power of morality is only truly understood by those who use it in the service of evil.

Slave-on-Slave Violence

Owning slaves only works if you do not have to bother yourself too much about controlling your slaves – since that is time-consuming, expensive, and threatens the profits.

No, slavery is far more profitable – in fact, it only can be profitable – if, instead of having to expend time and energy attacking your slaves, you can program the slaves to attack each other.

And this is the purpose of “culture.”

Culture and Objectivity

Before looking into how we slaves are programmed to attack each other, rather than question our masters, let us compare “culture” to truly objective disciplines.

Culture and Science

One of the reasons that biologists chose Latin to describe species was that Latin was an international language, at least in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Because the scientific method – post-Bacon – took as its most fundamental methodology the validation of human reasoning according to measurable and empirical reality, it was fundamentally cross-cultural in nature.

What is considered “good” and “proper” is very different in India than in America. The nature of a carbon atom, however, remains identical – as do the properties of gravity, magnetism, light, sound and so on.

The only thing that separates an Indian physicist from an American physicist is form – i.e. language – not content, i.e. science.

This is distinct from their separate cultures, in which both form and content wildly diverge.

The same is true for mathematicians – the only thing that separates Chinese and British mathematicians is the form of notation they use. The underlying principles and logic remain identical.

Musicians, too, through their manipulation of objective sound waves, also use an objective framework and produce exactly the same notes when reading the same notation.

Farmers also very easily work over cross-cultural “boundaries,” since an ear of corn does not suddenly become a nunchuck when crossing the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

Financial transactions are also cross-cultural – with the difference, of course, that they are subject to wild predations in the form of state coercion. An objective exchange rate exists between the rupee and the yen, which allows purchasing power to objectively cross cultural or geographical boundaries.

We could continue in this vein for some time, but let us at least at this point understand that there are numerous human disciplines that are rational and objective – but culture is not one of them.

Culture and Objectivity

Since culture is not objective, it must be subjective, at least to some degree.

To the degree that culture is subjective, it cannot make reference to any objective facts or realities. For instance, if I say, “I like vanilla ice cream,” I am expressing a subjective preference – quite distinct from saying, “Objectively, vanilla is the best flavour of ice cream.”

Furthermore, if I say not only that vanilla ice cream is the best flavour objectively, but also that it is immoral to prefer any other flavour, and moral to prefer vanilla, then clearly I am going far beyond the bounds of rationality.

Not only am I claiming that vanilla is objectively “best,” but also that it is the only moral ideal, and that any preference for any other flavour is immoral.

The elevation of a subjective preference to an objective ideal – especially when it involves ethics – is simply called bigotry.

Thus culture, by elevating subjective preferences for local customs to objective – and often moral – ideals, is merely a species of petty, self-righteous, pompous, false, prejudicial and ugly bigotry.

Culture is the most dangerous lie in the world, because false moral ideals are always required for the execution of evil.

Now, what is moral must be enforced – thus by turning subjective preferences into “objective morality,” culture opens wide the hellish gates of violent control.

In other words, by turning violence into virtue, culture not only excuses violence – culture creates violence.

What Slaves Really Fear

Culture can thus be accurately viewed as a set of moral mythologies that are used to create, justify and extend violence against the majority of individuals.

What is it, then, that prevents us from shrugging off these choking and enslaving falsehoods?

In other words, who are you most afraid of?

If you start to speak the truth about culture, mythology, exploitation and violence, whose response frightens you the most?

If you openly speak about the simple reality that the state is violence, are you afraid that black-suited SWAT teams will burst through your windows and drag you off to Guantanamo Bay?

If you say that religious superstition is an exploitive lie, that the New York attacks were an unjust retaliation to far more unjust American attacks upon Muslims, that soldiers are merely men paid to kill others, like any hit-men – whose response do you fear the most?

There is a reason that we do not say these things.

There is a reason that we smile and nod and wave our flags and cheer our leaders and refuse to speak the simple truths that would inevitably set us free.

That reason is not that we are afraid of our leaders, or their thugs, or their jails, or their tortures.

The reason that we bite our tongues is that we are afraid of each other.

Why We Are Talking About Culture…

The reason that we are talking about culture and statism and religion – rather than only your personal relationships – is this:

The moment that you begin to speak the truth – a prerequisite for any form of intimacy – you will be attacked by your fellow slaves.

The question, then, since no one likes to be attacked, is: why bother speaking the truth at all?

Well, we speak the truth because we want the future to be different from the present – our own personal future, in terms of having honor, honesty and integrity in our personal relationships – and the future of the world, which yearns and deserves to be free.

If you truly take on the concepts in this book – if you speak openly and honestly about the truth – you will be endlessly attacked, your life will become very difficult in countless ways, and very few of your existing relationships – if any – will survive your new honesty.

Now, I could tell you that somewhere beyond the darkness that you will be cast into, lies a golden land of beauty, intimacy, love, laughter and true and deep friendship.

However, I cannot tell you that.

I cannot tell you that, because I cannot guarantee that.

You may be for various reasons stuck in a small town full of patriotic bigots and religious cultists.

You may be 15 years old, and remain dependent upon your parents for years to come.

You may be old, and dependent upon your children.

You may be the only sane rationalist in an Islamic village.

You may find that, if the truth destroys your marriage – or rather reveals its prior destruction – that you may never get married again, or have a satisfying romantic relationship.

You may find that, when you speak the truth to your adult children, they won’t want to have anything to do with you anymore.

I want to be clear about the dangers that always follow honesty.

We are not enslaved because we are cowards.

We are enslaved because we are objectively in danger.

We should take some relief in the enormous difficulties faced by those who speak the truth – because, if speaking the truth were easy, the state of the world, its bottomless and exploitive lies, would make absolutely no sense at all.

No, speaking the truth is incredibly difficult, and very dangerous – and not because of prisons, and not because of our masters, but because of the endless attacks from our fellow slaves.

When you sit around your family table at Christmas or Thanksgiving, it is worth taking a moment to let this basic reality seep into your very bones.

When you look at the ruddy, smiling faces around the table, it is essential to truly and finally understand that, in reality, these people are your masters.

It is not the whips of our owners that keep us down, but the frowns and snarls of our fellow slaves.

It is not the jails of our masters that keep us huddled and frozen in fear, but the disapproval of our fellow slaves.

The “state” is not in Washington, or Rome, or Madrid, or Ottawa, or Baghdad.

The “state” is not the guns of the police, the truncheons of the prison guards, the huts of the gulags, the cells of the prisons, the grenades of the troops, or the jostling darkness of the paddy wagons.

These are merely the effects, not the cause.

The “state” is not far away from you.

It is not distant.

It is not political.

It is not economic.

It is not military.

The “state” is your fellow slaves.

The Costs of the Truth

When you sit with your family at dinner, and you begin to speak the truth, no SWAT team will come through your windows. No policeman will pound down your door. No trap door will open beneath your chair and suck you into the maw of some Syrian gulag.

The political state will not lift a finger against you.

Yet still – you are terrified to speak.

Why?

Simply because you know what will happen.

You know that you will not be attacked by the state.

You know you will be attacked by your family.

You will not be abused by your masters.

You will be abused by those around you.

You will not be humiliated by physical torture in the future.

You will be humiliated by emotional torture in the present.

Your masters will not try to control you.

Your family will.

And that is why masters exist.

Your family is the state.

The government is merely an effect of the family.

So – Why Speak?

I am telling you all of this for three main reasons.

First, so that you truly understand what you are getting into.

Second, so that you have a greater appreciation of why you have not spoken the truth in the past – so that you can be more gentle with yourself.

If speaking the truth were easy, and everyone still lied, then the world could not be saved. However, because speaking the truth can be almost unbearably difficult, the world can be saved, because people are not just cowards, but rather are frightened for very good reasons.

Thirdly, I am telling you this so that you can understand the essential service that you are providing the world by speaking the truth.

The world will not be saved by the violent lies of culture, but by the rational light of truth.

Idealists who disregard the real danger of their ideals tend to become masochists, or nihilists.

The future will not be improved by masochists, but by idealists.

I do not want you to embark upon this amazing journey in order to feel pain.

It certainly is true that you will feel pain during this journey, but you need to understand – if you are to succeed – the enormous virtue and value of what you are doing.

The reasons for refraining from speaking the truth are self-evident – we feel them all the time, every single day – the reasons for speaking the truth, however, are far from evident and can at times seem purely imaginary.

As we move into the final section of this book – how to implement the principles of the Real-Time Relationship in your own life – your anxiety will rise precipitously. You will feel clammy, your hands will sweat, you may shake, your sleep will decrease, your stomach will flip and your tension will mount.

That is how much, deep down, we so desperately want to be free.

And how much we fear our fellow slaves.

During this process, you will feel strong urges to fling this “evil” book across the room, and get back into the comfortable little box of social conformity.

Fling away – be my guest, I can take it!

Then, take a deep breath, walk across the room, and pick this book up again.

This book is not about me, or my ideas, but you, and your freedom.

The Goal

Speaking the truth can sometimes feel like self-abuse, but I will share with you one thought, one vision that keeps me going, when the path is darkest.

In my mind’s eye, I see a world where people can be honest without fear – where the desperate terror that truth tellers feel now will only be felt by a few liars and cheats.

I see a world where relaxed and benevolent intimacy is the natural state of human relations.

I see a world without masters – not without a hierarchy, since ambitions and talents vary – but without coercive, exploitive and destructive monopolies like church, state and the cult of the family.

I desperately want to live in that world, but I know that I cannot, since what we are talking about here is a multi-generational project at best.

I desperately want to live in that world, but since I cannot, the best that I can hope for is to do my part to help create that world for the future.

I cannot live in a free world. I can barely see it from where I am. I squint at it though, like a man at the bottom of a well searching for a star in the distant circle of night sky above him.

I wish with all my heart that I lived in that world – and, if I did live in that world, I would feel such enormous gratitude for the brave souls who did everything they could to bring that wonderful world into being. I would admire their courage, to sacrifice immediate personal comfort for the sake of creating this wondrous world.

I feel that gratitude flowing down the steps of time from the future.

I feel the joy of those who live in a free world that we can only begin to create.

I feel them looking back in time to we poor struggling courageous souls, and thanking us for making their world so beautiful.

It is their gratitude that picks me up when I fall.

It is also the near-infinite sorrow that I would feel if I knew that such a world were to never come into being.

Imagining an eternity of human experience that is little better than what we have today – where good people cower like beaten dogs, while evil braggarts strut and rule – would make the story of our species an infinite tragedy – especially given our wondrous potential for truth and beauty.

Evil will fade from this world, if we act with integrity now.

Evil will fade from this world, but we must give up many seemingly-pleasant things in order to end it.

Surely we are glad that the early pioneers of science did not bow to the difficulties of their struggle, but persevered against torture and oppression, giving us a world of technology, medicine and wonder that they did not live to see.

We do not live in their world of medieval ignorance only because they were willing to imagine our world of science and knowledge, and work to create it.

The world we will create will be as wondrous to those who live in it as ours would be to the medieval mind.

I just wanted to remind you of the world we are in fact creating, because the beauty of the goal – even though we shall never live to see it – makes the difficulties of the journey all worthwhile.

Real-Time Relationships: The Theory

Let us now turn to the task of putting all that we have learned and discussed in the previous pages into action.

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR) is based on two core principles, designed to liberate both you and others in your communication with each other:

1. Thoughts precede emotions.
2. Honesty requires that we communicate our thoughts and feelings, not our conclusions.

Thoughts Precede Emotions

The first thing to understand about emotions is that they are not objective responses to the outside world, but rather objective responses to our internal premises – i.e. standardized responses to subjective stimuli.

To picture this in reality, think of our two good friends Bob and Doug sitting on a couch watching a hockey game, where Canada is playing the United States.

Bob the Canadian cheers every time Canada scores a goal; Doug the American cheers every time the United States scores a goal.

Here we have an example of an objective event occurring – a hockey puck bouncing into a net – which causes one man elation, and the other despair.

Clearly, these emotional responses cannot be directly caused by the movement of the puck, since the same action is producing opposite emotional results.

Now, earlier I defined “love” as our involuntary response to virtue – here I would like to append a qualifier, which is that love is our involuntary response to virtue if we are virtuous.

Bob is a fan of Team Canada, and so he cheers on that team – if we are a fan of Team Virtue, we cheer on that team. If we are a fan of Team-Not-So-Much-With-The-Virtue, we will cheer on the team with darker jerseys instead.

Now, emotions are distinct from sensations, insofar as sensations are neurobiological stimuli that occur independent of our thoughts.

“Happiness” is an emotion; physical pain is a sensation. While Bob and Doug might have opposite emotional reactions to the movement of a puck, they would not have opposite sensations if that puck happened to hit them in the face at high speed – both would feel blinding agony.

Similarly, what is called “runner’s high,” or the euphoria that results from the release of endorphins during strenuous exercise, is a sensation, as is the giddy joy that results from taking heroin.

Since physical sensations do not depend upon our thoughts, philosophy can do very little to aid us in controlling or managing them. No syllogism can eliminate a toothache – the alleviation of physical pain is a medical matter; philosophy is for the soul.

Thus we shall focus in this section on the thoughts that precede emotions, so that we can better understand how to change our thoughts – and thus change our emotions.

Emotions and Control

Everyone who has absorbed even the basic principles of psychological self-awareness and self-knowledge understands that it is impossible to directly control other people. We can only control our own thoughts and our own behaviours – we cannot control other people’s thoughts, behaviours or emotions.

However, it is also important to understand that we cannot control our own emotions either.

If we stand at the edge of a cliff and hurl a stone with all our might into the ocean below, our only choice is whether to throw the stone or not – once the stone has left our hand, it is utterly out of our control.

In the same way, once we believe certain premises within our own minds, the emotions that will result from those premises are utterly out of our control.

Expectations: An Example

When I am working on a book, I plan to spend a certain number of hours a day writing. On many days, however, my plans get interrupted, because something else comes up which takes a higher priority. Perhaps there is a problem with the Freedomain website, or a podcast I uploaded got cut off, or is mislabelled, or a listener wants to have a conversation about an immediate issue, or an employee calls with an urgent question and so on.

At times, I find myself getting irritated if a seemingly-endless stream of minor interruptions prevents me from getting to my “real” task. I set myself up to begin writing, get my coffee, reread what I’ve previously written, raise my hands to type – and then receive a message which prevents me from getting started.

If my thought is: I must write, then naturally every “interruption” moves me further back from achieving that goal. I then feel acute frustration, just as if I were trying to juggle and people were tossing squash balls at my head.

My temptation on these days is to externalize and trivialize the cause of these “interruptions.” What I basically say to myself is: “Jesus Christ! I’ve been trying to get down to writing for the past three hours, and everybody wants a piece of me, and I just can’t get down to what I need to get done! If I don’t get this book finished, then I won’t have enough money to advertise in two to three months, because book income is more steady than donations! And why is it that everybody picks today to need something from me – can’t they manage things themselves for once, just for today?”

And so on, and so on. We all know this mantra, which is: “I am the hard-done-by victim just trying to get something done, while every incompetent on the planet keeps interrupting me when they could take two seconds to figure out the answer to their question!”

When I notice myself sinking into this convenient little swamp of mythology, I try to reshape my thoughts – usually with great success – along the following lines:

“You are the victim? What nonsense! You left every instant messaging program on the planet open on your desktop. You checked your e-mail. You had a look at what was happening on the Freedomain Board. You picked up the phone. Also, you are the one deciding what is a higher priority than writing – no one is ordering you to do that! If you decide to republish a podcast because it was cut off, that is your choice – you could very easily keep writing and simply republish the podcast later. And finally, is the fact that people need some sort of feedback from you, or are providing you with helpful information, really such an enormous problem? Would you be more content if you had five listeners, and no capacity to do this amazing job on a full-time basis? Then you would certainly have fewer interruptions, but your irritation at being interrupted would be replaced by despair about the planet as a whole!”

In other words, what I can do in these situations is simply to realign my expectations – which has everything to do with remembering that my core goal every day is to move this philosophical conversation forward in some manner – or, at least, prevent it from being moved backwards!

Thus on any given day, my purpose is not to write, or to respond to an e-mail, or to publish a podcast, but rather to do whatever it takes to move this philosophical conversation forward!

When I remember that, I no longer view interruptions as “interruptions.”

I remember that every day is a kind of dance between what you can plan for, and what you cannot. I remember that it is great to have specific goals, but they must all be measured relative to the overall goal.

Obviously, having a podcast out there that ends abruptly does not move this conversation forward, but rather irritates listeners, consumes bandwidth since they have to re-download, wastes time on the part of the listeners because they have to reload the podcast and find where it was cut off, then listen through to the end, and so on.

Since my goal is to bring as positive an experience as possible to this conversation – since heaven knows philosophy is already hard enough – clearly the immediate requirement to re-upload the podcast takes precedence over writing a few more pages in a book that will not be out for several months.

Also, it is important to remember that all days are part of a generalized “bell curve” of interruptions. Some days you can sail through with barely a ripple, while on other days, messages pile up seemingly without end. At some point, I will either explode with frustration, or surrender to the reality of where a particular day is on the bell curve, laugh about it, and put aside my writing until later.

I do find that, once I realign my expectations to take into account the empirical facts of what is happening – interruptions are piling up – then I find another interruption funny, rather than annoying.

Recognizing the “push and pull” of life – that we must make plans, but that our plans will be interrupted – takes a great deal of stress out of every day. Clearly, we cannot control interruptions – else they would scarcely be called interruptions – but we can recognize that interruptions are inevitable, and adjust our expectations accordingly.

Certainly, we will all face a rather final “interruption” called death – and so I try my best not to be too bothered by any interruption that is less significant!

Thoughts and Frustration

In the above example, it is clear that my thoughts (“interruptions are bad, because I must write!”) are clearly contradicting the reality of my situation.

If I believe both that writing is my highest priority, and also that dealing with interruptions is my highest priority, then of course I will end up feeling frustrated and paralyzed, just as I would if I truly felt that I had to go both north and south at the same time.

Practically, it is impossible for two actions that cannot be performed simultaneously to have exactly the same prioritization, because we have to choose between them.

When the rigidity of my thoughts does not keep up with the flexibility that new information requires, I am in a situation where an unstoppable force (“I must write!”) is hitting an immovable object (“I must deal with these interruptions!”).

When this occurs, I cannot rationally choose to raise the priority of dealing with interruptions without lowering the priority of writing.

If I attempt to maintain both priorities – despite the physical impossibility of this – then naturally I will become anxious and frustrated. If I know that it is going to take me an hour to get to a particular appointment, and I cannot find my keys, then I know that the time I spend looking for my keys is going to be added on to the time it takes me to get to the appointment. Thus, if I cannot find my keys, I must call to tell whoever I am meeting that I will be late.

If I try to maintain two opposing absolutes within my mind: “I must find my keys” and “I must be on time” then of course I will end up feeling frustrated and anxious.

The feelings follow the thoughts.

If I accept that “I must find my keys,” takes a higher priority over “I must be on time,” then I must give up the absolute of being on time. There is simply no other rational choice.

Choose Your Thoughts, Choose Your Feelings…

This is a relatively minor example of how our thoughts can directly influence – or create – our feelings.

Here is another.

Years ago, I had to fly to Paris, France for a business trip. Unfortunately, I could not find my passport. I looked and looked, and got progressively more anxious, tense and upset as the hours passed.

Once I realized the panic I was getting into, I took a deep breath, and said the following to myself:

“Either I will find my passport, and go to France, or I will not find my passport, and I will not go to France.”

This really helped me relax, and took the ground-shaking tension out of the situation.

As long as the absolute statement was: “I must go to France,” there really was no limit to the emotional escalation.

The moment that I gave myself a choice – or rather recognized the true options – my tension diminished considerably.

Either I was going to France, or I was not going to France – but I certainly did not “have to” go to France.

As the old saying goes, the only thing we gotta do is die.

Attempting to sustain two opposing thoughts – “doublethink,” in Orwellian terms – creates an enormous stress and tension within our minds, and tends to crank up our “fight or flight” mechanism to the boiling point.

The Impossibility of Control…

This is a continual problem in our relationships. In our own minds, we so often set up an absolute called: “My spouse must do X” – which we have absolutely no capacity to control or achieve!

This combination of an absolute requirement for a behavioural change in another person – along with a complete inability to effect that change – creates enormous tension, anxiety and hostility in our relationships.

When I was stressed out about finding my passport, it was because I had an absolute goal, but no direct control over my capacity to achieve that goal.

Flying to France required that I find my passport – but I had no direct control over my capacity to find my passport. I could do my best, of course, but in the end, either I would find it, or I would not. (I did find it, if you’re curious, and had a great trip!)

My Best Friend and My New Girlfriend

Let us imagine that I am dating someone new, and I really want to introduce her to my best friend.

Obviously, I would prefer it if my best friend really liked my new girlfriend, since it would be far easier for me if I were able to spend stress-free time with both of them.

What options do I have to bring about this result?

I can certainly introduce my new girlfriend in the most positive light, and sing her praises, and show my friend that I am happier for having her in my life – which will all doubtless have some influence over the outcome – but I cannot control directly whether or not my friend likes my new girlfriend.

If I have in my mind an absolute: “He must like my new girlfriend!” then I will have a very stressful time of it when they meet.

(It is certainly true that my stress will lower the likelihood that my friend will like my new girlfriend, but we shall come back to that in a little while.)

If we understand how we can most rationally and honestly deal with this meeting, we can begin to approach the question of the Real-Time Relationship.

What is the most rational and honest statement that I can make to myself about this upcoming meeting between my best friend and my girlfriend?

Clearly, it is: “I would really like it if my friend liked my girlfriend, but I have no control over that outcome whatsoever.”

Can we all feel the sweet relief inherent in this statement?

Control versus Curiosity

When I stopped frantically hunting for my passport, took a breath, and reminded myself of the reality of my situation, something very interesting occurred for me emotionally.

I actually wondered if I would end up going to France.

In other words, instead of being desperate to get to France, I became curious about whether or not I would end up going to France.

The opposite of control is – curiosity.

When we give up false control, we open ourselves up to true curiosity.

This is the transition from religion (false control) to science (true curiosity).

When I honestly say: “I would really like it if my friend liked my girlfriend, but I have no control over that outcome whatsoever,” the wonderful thing that happens is that I can now become curious about the outcome of the meeting.

Instead of saying: “I must control what will happen!” I can say: “I wonder what will happen?”

This is a very different state of mind.

This is rational empiricism at its finest. Instead of saying: “Sacrificing this goat will control the rains!” we can say: “I wonder why it rains?”

Abandoning our illusions of control opens us up to the magnificent wonder of curiosity.

In my mind, when I say to my friend: “You must like my new girlfriend,” I am treating him as an object to be manipulated for the sake of my desires, rather than an independent conscious being.

When I say: “I will control my friend,” the greatest lie is not that I think I can control him, but that I think I am treating him as a friend.

Using Others

Catastrophes

Why do I care so much about whether or not my friend likes my new girlfriend?

Clearly, I enjoy spending time with my friend – and I also enjoy spending time with my girlfriend. It certainly would be convenient for me if they also enjoyed spending time with each other, so I would not end up torn between a complicated and antipathetic social situation.

That is the story that I tell myself.

But that is not the truth.

In this book – as in every book I write, every article I publish, and every podcast I record – I will consistently and continually tell you that deep down, you always already know the truth about everything.

The truth is that good people always like other good people. Good people do not like bad people, and bad people do not like good people.

With bad people, it is more unstable. They will really “like” each other, then really dislike each other, and so on.

If my best friend is a good person, and my new girlfriend is also a good person, I will feel no more stress in introducing them to each other than I would in introducing cream to my coffee.

It is not that I dislike the social awkwardness that will result if they do not like each other. Oh no, it is far worse than that!

What I am really afraid of is discovering the true nature of my relationships – and thus of myself.

The Truth I Am Avoiding…

If my best friend dislikes my new girlfriend, it is either because my best friend is corrupt and my new girlfriend is virtuous – or vice versa – or because they are both corrupt, in ways that do not serve each other’s immediate needs, but rather remind each other of their respective corruption.

Thus if my new girlfriend and my best friend do not get along, that says something rather terrible about – who?

My new girlfriend? My best friend?

No, of course not.

About me.

This next part may sound very strange – but give me a paragraph or two, and perhaps it will make some sense. J

By introducing my new girlfriend to my best friend with the anxious hope that they will somehow “get along,” I am asking them to cover up the corruption that we are all enmeshed in.

I am asking everyone to pretend that we are all good – and there is only one reason why I would do that, or why they would agree to participate in such a corrupt fraud.

Because we are not good.

We will do almost anything to avoid that knowledge – not because we fear our own corruption, but because we desire to continue our own corruption.

If my best friend is corrupt and my new girlfriend is not corrupt, then she will judge – not my best friend, but rather me.

If my best friend is not corrupt, but my new girlfriend is, then they will dislike each other, of course – but some rather grim fallout will result from their meeting.

If I introduce a false, insecure and manipulative girlfriend to my best friend, obviously I am doing so in the hopes that they will “get along.”

If my best friend is a good man, then he will be highly insulted by this, and will say:

“Why would you introduce this woman to me and express a desire that we ‘get along’? Are you not aware that she is false and manipulative? Are you not aware that she is vain and shallow? Are you not aware that she talked about herself for over an hour, not asking me a single question? Are you not aware that she told me everything about her childhood – which was not pleasant – on our very first meeting? Do you not see that she lacks any rational sense of boundaries? Do you not see how self-involved and narcissistic she is?”

If I reply that I noticed none of these things, then my friend is going to be even more insulted, and say:

“But you value me as your best friend, and I exhibit none of these traits – in fact, I would consider it personally dishonourable to act in such a manner! I assumed that you valued my integrity, consideration, courage and so on because you could tell them apart from their respective opposites. If you tell me that I am the best singer in the world, and then it turns out that you are completely deaf, then clearly I cannot take your praise seriously at all – in fact, your former ‘praise’ of me would be revealed as false and manipulative, since you have no ability whatsoever to judge the quality of my singing! Thus if you cannot tell the difference between this woman and myself, then clearly you have no right to call me your ‘best friend,’ but have rather used that term to manipulate me.”

In response, I might protest that I did notice these troublesome habits in this woman, but it slipped my mind for a moment.

“Very well,” my friend will reply, “now I am even more insulted, because you introduced this woman to me in the hopes that I would like her! You recognize that she is shallow, false and manipulative; you also recognize that I am virtuous, honest and direct, and yet you genuinely and honestly believed that I would like her? Yet you claim that I am your best friend – and that you love me – because of my virtues. How is it, then, that you expect me to like this woman because of her vices? Why are we subjected to such opposite standards? No, it cannot be possible that you expected me to like her – the best that you could have hoped for was that I would pretend to like her – for your benefit, and hers of course. In other words, you wanted me to sacrifice my integrity for the sake of your shallow lusts!”

Now, when faced with such a stern and inescapable accusation, what would my response be?

I could get mad at my friend – thus confirming his diagnosis and effectively ending the friendship – or I could apologize profusely, promise to get help with my dangerous and slippery “dark side,” and immediately break it off with this corrupt woman.

If I were capable of this kind of integrity, though, I would never have tried to manipulate my virtuous friend into pretending to “like” my new girlfriend in the first place.

In fact, we can very reasonably go one step further and say that since I was the kind of man who had no problem whatsoever with manipulating a virtuous friend for my own selfish and corrupt ends, there is no possibility whatsoever that I would have a virtuous friend to begin with!

And that, my friends, is the knowledge that I am striving desperately to avoid – not my fear that my friends are immoral, but my desire to keep my immoral friends.

The moment that our own corruption becomes genuinely clear to us, we are immediately propelled into wrenching change.

We avoid the truth about our own corruption because we prefer our own corruption to the dreadful alternative…

To the endless attacks from our fellow slaves.

The alcoholic keeps drinking because he is enmeshed in a social network of mutual destruction.

Deep down, the alcoholic is not afraid of sobriety; he is afraid of being attacked by his fellow alcoholics and enablers.

Introducing Myself to Myself…

Thus, when I attempt to control the results of the first meeting between my best friend and my new girlfriend, I am really attempting to control my own anxiety by manipulating others.

This much we understand – but let us go one step further.

Why do I feel anxiety in the first place?

Well, I feel anxiety because I know the truth, and I am rejecting the truth.

In my real life, I do not feel anxiety when my wife comes home, because I am always overjoyed to see her. I rush down the stairs into her arms, and smother her with kisses.

I do not feel anxiety when I receive an e-mail from a trusted friend.

I do feel anxiety whenever I receive an e-mail from an embittered enemy – for the simple reason that these e-mails often contain unpleasant attacks which upset me.

In other words, I feel anxiety when I instinctively feel the signs of an impending attack.

Anxiety is a form of beneficial alertness, essential for survival throughout the history of our species. Anxiety is the crack of a stick in a thick bush on a dark night. Anxiety alerts us to impending danger.

Anxiety is part of our “fight or flight” neurological mechanism, designed to make the presence of danger uncomfortable – and so aid us in avoiding or escaping it.

Anxiety and Control

Imagine that you are the first man who ever tried to tame a horse.

You approach a horse in the wilds with great trepidation – and great desire. You know that if you can tame this beast, you can ride it and harness it to a plough. You overcome your fear by keeping your eye on the prize.

Imagine that you do catch this horse and tame it, at least to some degree. After harnessing the power of the animal, you begin to change your farming practices – you buy more land, hire more farmhands, invest in heavier ploughs, and fall deeply into debt.

Taming the horse, in other words, causes you to make decisions that depend on the horse remaining tame.

As the months pass, however, you begin to notice that the horse does not seem to appreciate being controlled. Initially, it tries to escape, but you catch it every time and bring it back. After a while, it no longer tries to escape – except perhaps on occasion – but it continually struggles to cast off its harness, throw its riders, veer to the left or right, and sometimes refuses to eat.

Here, you become stuck in a truly impossible situation.

If you had never seen the horse – or tried to tame it – you would never have changed all of your farming habits based on your expectation of being able to harness the horse’s power.

If, even months after being “domesticated,” the horse had simply bolted off and vanished into the wilderness, you would have shrugged your shoulders, sold your excess land, fired your extra workers, and resumed your former way of farming.

However, since the horse is at times obedient, and at times recalcitrant, you become truly stuck. Since you have invested so much time, energy and resources on the assumption that the horse can be controlled, you cannot now stomach the idea of simply turning the horse loose and resuming your former life.

The Subtle Tyranny of Inconsistency

As the weeks and months pass, the horse’s inconsistent obedience continues to drain more and more of your time and resources. On any given day, you can never be quite sure that the horse is going to do what you need it to do. In the morning, the horse pulls the plough beautifully – in the afternoon, it kicks a worker and cannot be restrained.

As you sink even more time and energy into trying to control the horse, your stress and anxiety continue to escalate.

After a few months, you begin to feel truly trapped – by this time, you have invested too much to turn the horse loose, but as every day goes by, it becomes more and more wasteful and frustrating to use the horse at all. (This is also known as the “waiting for the bus” syndrome – when you have waited an hour for a bus, you are far less likely to walk. We have all been there with computers as well!)

When you initially started off, you wanted to control the horse – as time goes by, however, it becomes more and more apparent that the horse is in fact controlling you.

You initially tried to tame the horse in order to reduce your workload – however, it becomes increasingly clear that having the horse around makes your job harder and more stressful.

The Vengeance of the Slave

If we recast the “horse story” above in terms of human slavery, a very similar pattern emerges.

If the slave cannot escape, and is beaten if he does not work hard, then his vengeance will always take on a more subtle form.

The slave will perform his work slightly more slowly – not enough to be punished, but enough to irritate his master.

The slave will pretend to be less intelligent than he really is, so that when he loses or breaks things, he will be more likely to escape punishment, since he is pretending in effect to be a child.

As mentioned above, the slave will also do what he can to promote any negative habits his master may have. If his master likes to drink, the slave will always be on hand to refill his cup. If his master has a tendency towards jealousy, the slave will innocently “mention” that he saw his master’s wife chatting with another man.

If the slave is particularly cunning, he will also do everything that he can to inflate his master’s ego. He will sing his master’s praises, claim joy in “knowing his place,” thank the master for everything he does, and remain fanatically “loyal.”

This hyperinflation of the master’s ego inevitably creates pettiness, vanity, hyper-irritability, and unbearable pomposity.

In other words, the slave will always turn his master into an unhappy man – who is constantly annoyed, who cannot experience love, and who engenders no respect from those around him – particularly his children. (One of the worst aspects of being a slave-owner is that it turns you into a terrible and abusive father.)

As a result of the slave’s passive-aggressive manipulations, the master becomes prone to violence – verbal and physical – self-abusive habits, crippling self-blindness, and sinks into a bottomless pit of discontent and misery.

This is the vengeance of the slave.

All slaves are Iago.

And, for the most part, all children are slaves.

As you were.

The Dangers of Vengeance

As we discussed above in the parable of the boxer, the great danger for the slave is his capacity to become addicted to the dark “satisfactions” of passive-aggressive vengeance.

By enslaving his master, the slave gains a sense of control – and also re-creates in his master his own experience of enslavement.

It is a subtle cry of hatred – and plea for empathy.

The horse above that cannot be free ends up enslaving its master.

A slave can only hope for freedom by making owning slaves unbearable for his master.

Not only might the slave’s endless passive-aggressive noncompliance and provocation provoke suicide on the part of his master – but his master’s miserable existence might also serve as a warning for others who might wish to own slaves.

In other words, the horse that makes its “owner” miserable is performing an enormous service to the freedom of other horses, since anyone else who is thinking of enslaving a horse will look at the stress experienced by existing horse owners and do pretty much anything to avoid that fate – thus leaving other horses free to roam.

However, as mentioned above, the greatest danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to the sense of control that comes from manipulating his master.

In other words, the great danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to his slavery.

If a slave begins to believe his own master-destroying propaganda, then in the absence of masters, he will create them.

The Slavery of Childhood

Most of us are raised as slaves. Our opinions are rarely sought, rules are rarely explained – and moral rules never are – we are shipped off to schools where we are treated disrespectfully; our subservience is bought with rewards, and our independence is punished with detentions. Scepticism and curiosity are scorned and belittled, while empty abilities like throwing balls, learning dates, sitting still and “being pretty” are praised and elevated.

Lies about our history become cages for our futures. Lies about our own intelligence and originality lead us to the petty enslavement of “good citizenship” – and horrifying fairy tales about life in the absence of coercive or religious control scare us back into our slave pens the moment we even think of glancing outside to the green and beautiful hills beyond our bars.

Collective punishments turn us against each other; the “kibbles and whips” of the classroom reward us for laughing at each other to gain the favor of the teacher; terrifying and brutal “morality” is inflicted upon us. We are punished for not treating those in authority with “respect” (do they treat us with respect?) – and we are bred for a life of subservience, fear, productivity and dependence as surely as fattened calves are bred for veal.

Where in the past we were not taught to fear the priests, but rather the imaginary devils the priests warned us of, now we are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war – but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!

The entire purpose of state education is to make sure that we never truly “leave” our childhoods: that we spend our lives trembling in fear of imaginary predators, begging for “protection” from those who threaten us with the most harm.

As sure as sunrise, we will grow and mature, leave the control of our parents, and strive to make our way in the world.

As children, we are slaves who will inevitably be “set free.”

How, then, can we remain enslaved?

Why through false virtue, of course.

But you’ll have to read my book “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion” for that! J

Holding Our Own Chains…

Because our lives are so controlled by our political, familial and religious masters, we always and inevitably attempt to regain a sense of control by controlling each other.

We cannot control our politicians; we cannot control the church; we cannot control our parents – and we are bullied and controlled by all these people – and so we turn in panic and fear to controlling each other, which makes the institutional control of all of us both possible and profitable.

To return to the incident outlined earlier, wherein I try to make my best friend like my new girlfriend, it is clear that I am really attempting to control my own anxiety – my knowledge of my own corruption and the corruption of those around me – rather than either my friend or my girlfriend.

What will the likely result of my “control” be?

Well, if my girlfriend says something unpleasant or awkward, I will feel great anxiety, and flash her look of anger or “concern.” If my best friend sighs or rolls his eyes in response to something my new girlfriend says, then I will rush in to “explain” what she “really” meant.

Basically, I will sprint back and forth throughout the conversation, trying to eliminate or explain away any symptoms of disapproval or negativity.

What will the experience of my friend and girlfriend be?

Will they feel free? Will they feel that they can express themselves openly?

Of course not.

They will feel a rising irritation towards me – since no one likes to be manipulated and controlled for the sake of someone else’s anxiety.

My girlfriend will look at my frantic efforts to “explain” her weird or awkward statements as insulting to her. My friend will see my actions as guilty and panic-stricken – and a foolish attempt to make him “respect” a woman that I clearly do not respect.

My girlfriend will also see that I am terribly and painfully vulnerable to any negative opinion that my “best friend” might have of her.

Deep down, she very well understands that this is because I share that negative opinion.

In other words, I am only afraid of having my bag searched in a store if I have actually stolen something. In the same way, I am only afraid of a negative opinion of my girlfriend if at some level I share that opinion.

Seeing me strive to control my friend’s perception of her, she also clearly understands that I am very willing to sacrifice her own sense of self-esteem and social competency if someone else disapproves of what she is doing.

It becomes blindingly clear that I will sacrifice her happiness – in other words, my good opinion of her – on the off chance that someone else might react negatively to her.

In other words, I will side with others against her.

Does this make her feel treasured? Does this make her respect my loyalty? Does this help her respect my integrity?

Of course not.

By elevating the power that my friend has in this situation, I automatically devalue my girlfriend – and thus myself.

However, the only reason that I wish to control the power that my friend has is because I have given him that power in the first place.

This is what I mean when I say that all manipulation is self-manipulation.

Trying to control my friend’s reaction to my girlfriend is as deranged as giving a gun to a madman, and then trying to talk him into giving me the gun back.

Power and Liberty

n any intimate relationship, we inevitably surrender power to others.

When you fall in love, you hand your heart to your lover on a platter.

Since love, as discussed earlier, involves integrity, and thus reduces insecurity, to refuse to be vulnerable with a lover is to openly state that you do not love her.

Thus there is no possibility that love does not involve a surrender of power.

When we try to control those who have power over us, we are clearly saying that we do not trust them to exercise that power benevolently.

It is a basic fact of life that virtuous people will rarely submit to the manipulations of others. Virtuous people know that they use their power over others benevolently – and thus experience it as insulting when other people try to control them.

A surgeon finds it equally insulting if someone attempts to wrestle his knife away from him, as if he were a common criminal.

The reality of trust and vulnerability is that if you do not trust someone, you should not be vulnerable towards her.

The solution to this, of course, is not to refrain from being vulnerable – otherwise how would you know who is trustworthy? – or to attempt to control those who exploit your vulnerability.

Remaining Vulnerable

The answer is to remain vulnerable to those around you, and systematically get rid of those who abuse your trust.

This is what I mean by the value of curiosity.

Most people take the approach that: others must treat me well, and if they do not treat me well, I am allowed to punish them.

This is pure nonsense, and a highly dangerous approach to relationships.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one has to treat you well.

We certainly prefer to be treated well – but that does not mean that we have a right to be treated well.

I prefer not to get colds – that does not mean I have a right to not get colds.

Controlling and insecure people always say: This person had better treat me well!

Curious and confident people always ask: I wonder if this person will treat me well?

In the same way, controlling and insecure people say: “There must be a God!” – while curious and competent people ask: “I wonder if there is a God?”

And… controlling and insecure people say: “There must be a government!” – while curious and competent people ask: “I wonder if there must be a government?”

Controlling and insecure people, if they receive bad service at a restaurant, feel abused and insulted, complain to everyone they know, launch lawsuits, and perform all other sorts of silly and enslaving actions.

Curious and confident people, if they receive bad service at a restaurant, simply pay their bill, leave, and never come back.

Now, if they have been coming to the same restaurant for many years and have always received excellent service, they will let the actions of one rude waiter slide. If they continue to receive bad service, they will speak to the waiter, and then to the manager, in order to try to help or save the relationship.

However, if their expressions of concern are met with indifference or contempt, then they simply stop returning to that restaurant.

They do not need to fight, they do not need to yell, they do not need to complain endlessly and they do not need to get engaged in all sorts of drama and nonsense, because they respect their own ability and right to choose their relationships voluntarily.

If they feel that they can only ever eat at that one restaurant – and can get food nowhere else – then of course they will get hysterical and aggressive, because they will be trapped in a situation of constant frustration and bad service!

This is, of course, our situation with regards to our government. Since we cannot choose how it interacts with us – or choose to avoid interacting with it – we remain in a constant state of frustration and hysterical or greedy control.

I would submit, though, that all of our relationships that are non-coercive in nature are subject to the same possibilities of choice.

Power and Family

Quality as a concept, as a measure, can only exist as a result of choice.

Where we have no options, there can be no quality. We know that this is true with regards to public schools, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the IRS, the Postal Service, and all other forms of coercive and controlled “interactions.”

We generally fail to remember, however, that when we were very young, we did not have any choice whatsoever.

We do not choose our parents, our schools, our siblings, our extended family, or our neighbourhood.

We also do not choose our country or our religion, but rather these things are inflicted on us by circumstances and propaganda.

There does come a time, however, when we do slowly begin to gain the capacity to choose with regards to our family.

After puberty and throughout our teenage years, we begin to experience a growing sense of choice. What we were born into no longer dominates us through natural biology or through our physical dependence upon our parents and utter subjugation to their whims and preferences.

Unfortunately, families – and society as a whole – inflict an enormous amount of propaganda upon us about the innate “value” of family and the endless virtue of “loving” your family.

However, as we can immediately see, propaganda about the value of something is scarcely required if that thing does in fact have value. Brad Pitt or George Clooney would never benefit from a system of “arranged” (i.e. enforced) marriage, since they have their pick of women anyway.

No, it is the man that no reasonable woman would want to marry who devoutly wishes to have marriage forced upon women.

Institutionalized coercion is all about attacking someone for noncompliance with an “ethical” absolute.

The IRS does not say: “Pay your taxes, or we will shoot you!” No, it is always presented as a virtuous obligation, insofar as you consume government services, love your country, care for the poor, the sick, the old, and so on. In other words, taxes are presented as payment for a voluntary interaction – like the bill that arrives with the plasma television – and thus refraining from paying your bill is portrayed as “dishonourable.” Don’t “cheat” on your taxes; pay your “fair share.”

In the same way, parents present themselves as devoted and loving servants of your well-being as a child and thus “demand” – whether actively or passively – your love and obedience as an adult.

Yet you no more “choose” to consume government services such as public education, roads, water and electricity than you “chose” to be born into your family.

Neither of these situations are voluntary or contractual – and thus by definition cannot contain any virtue or quality in and of themselves.

This does not mean that it is logically impossible to love your parents. They may have been virtuous, considerate, solicitous, kind and firm – and thus naturally you will love them.

However, it is essential to understand that if this is the case, you do not love your parents – you love the virtue of your parents.

What you love is not the category “parents,” but rather the action “virtue.”

“Virtue” is a choice, and thus involves quality – “parent” is not a choice – at least from the standpoint of the child – and thus in no way involves quality, but rather is a rejection of quality.

Choice and Quality

In a stateless society, we will doubtless need roads, and so we will enter into contracts with those who provide our roads, based on our evaluation of their efficiency, price and competence. It is these criteria of “evaluation” that drives the criterion – and thus the possibility – of quality.

Those who do not bring quality to the table never want the possibility of voluntary evaluation to exist.

In this way, we know that those parents who demand respect and love because they are parents are morally corrupt.

When your government demands “payment” at the point of a gun, it is because it is not providing value, in the same way that a mugger does not provide value, and so must extract your money through force.

Family and History

When we interact with our families – particularly as adult children – there is an essential aspect of curiosity that we constantly strive to avoid.

The unhappy and insecure man says: “She must treat me well!”

The happy and confident man says: “I wonder if she will treat me well?”

The adult child, with regards to his parents, knows the answer already – in his very bones.

The simple question that the adult child must ask is: “Did they treat me well?”

If this question seems too hard to answer, because of a blankness in your history, or an excess of propaganda from your family, then you can answer it even more simply.

“When I see their phone number on my call display, how do I feel?”

There is nothing that we need to be taught about how our parents treated us when we were children. There is no possibility of knowledge about another human being that you do not already possess in relation to your parents (and your siblings, of course, but we shall focus on your parents for the moment).

It is a fundamental fact of human physiology that our deepest emotions are immune to propaganda, just as physical pain is immune to propaganda.

You can be told over and over again as a child that jamming a knitting needle through your hand will not hurt, but rather will feel wonderful. You may even believe this in your conscious mind, but your hand knows better. When you do stick that knitting needle through your hand, no amount of propaganda or mythology can prevent the agony you will experience.

This is why we use anaesthetic in surgery, not storytelling.

This is why Novocain is a drug, not a mythology.

Most of our emotions result from our thoughts – but our deepest and truest feelings accumulate from years of experience. These feelings cannot be eradicated or changed, any more than our experience can be eradicated or changed. Learning another language as an adult is a conscious decision – learning language as a toddler is an unconscious accumulation of experience and innate ability.

These deepest emotions occur in the body – and the body is immune to propaganda. This is why control and rejection of the body is so essential to all exploitive power structures – think of the hostility that most religions have towards the flesh.

Since our deepest emotions cannot be eradicated through propaganda, propaganda must instead focus on the creation and maintenance of psychological defences.

Think of what happens when your phone rings, you look at the call display, and you see:

YOUR PARENTS!

What probably happens is that you experience an initial sinking sensation, followed by a strong desire to avoid picking up the phone. You roll your eyes, check your watch, figure out how much time you can waste talking to them, and generally feel the exact opposite of enthusiasm.

Then, of course, you feel guilt, and chastise yourself for your ingratitude and lack of consideration for their feelings.

They did so much for me, they ask for so little, they’re always concerned about me, it costs me so little to make them happy, etc. etc.

The picture of your mother’s long-suffering face will rise in your mind, and you imagine her sadness as she slowly puts down the phone, feeling rejected. You imagine your father’s irritation when your mother complains that, “She never seems to pick up the phone any more when I call – I’m sure she’s just busy, but…”

You feel – projected into the future – a growing unease about the ever-increasing emotional cost you will incur if you continue to avoid their calls. “Might as well get it over with now,” you say to yourself, reaching for the receiver – and then, to avoid the guilt of that feeling, you pump some enthusiastic shine into your voice as you answer.

After the initial exchange of pleasantries, you feel a rising tension and boredom, because you have nothing to say to your mother. She talks about this or that, asks you some questions which only elicit monosyllabic responses from you…

Then, the awkward silence descends…

You begin to tell a story; she murmurs some noncommittal responses. She begins telling a story about someone that you barely know, and you attempt to show interest. She asks you questions which are annoying, because they’re manipulative (“Have you met anyone nice recently?”) or unanswerable (“What will you buy your nephew for his baptism?”).

You realize how little of your life you can actually share with your mother, and for the millionth time you wonder how someone could have become so old and remained so uninteresting. You also wonder what pleasure she could possibly derive from these forced and empty interactions.

She must be taking some pleasure in calling you – otherwise why would she? – but you can’t imagine what that pleasure could possibly be.

You sigh, listening to her tinny voice, and wonder when the last time was that you had a problem in your life, and really wanted to call your mother for advice.

Never, comes back the immediate answer…

Then, your mother says she is going to put your father on the phone, and you scrabble to find an excuse that will not offend him too much – and then you remember that you have used up all your excuses over the last month or two, and that if you try to make up another one, he surely will get offended. And so you swallow, roll your eyes, and say: “Hi, Dad!”

And you know, deep in your bones, that this crushingly dull and awkward ritual will be repeated many more hundreds of times in your lifetime – and that the outcome will be exactly the same each time.

After you are finally able to get off the phone, you feel empty and a little depressed – but also relieved, because you know that you have bought a certain amount of guilt-free time away from your parents.

Then, you remember that Christmas is coming up, and your depression yawns to swallow you whole…

The Empiricism of Emotions

As we can see from the above example, it is clear that the debate you are really having is not with your parents, but with your own emotions.

Everything that you ever need to know about any of your relationships is available to you in that split second of emotional authenticity that occurs when the phone rings, and you look at the call display.

Whatever your emotions tell you in that split second before your defences can react is the natural and basic truth about that relationship.

And – believe it or not – your emotions are in fact trying to help you by telling you the truth about your relationships!

The Propaganda of Regret

(I will use the word “emotions” in this section to describe our deepest feelings that accumulate from experience, rather than the more conscious emotions described in the previous section.)

Your emotions are in fact telling you that you will not live forever, that there are no unchosen positive obligations, that the hours, days, weeks, months and years that you waste in negative, dull, abusive or unproductive relationships are never “refunded” to you – and that in particular, with your family, the endless “propaganda of regret” is nothing more than a corrupt and exploitive lie – a secular “hell” that was invented to enslave you.

When we are taught to fight ourselves, we always end up enslaved. The priest who hates and fears his own sexual impulses remains utterly enslaved. The citizen who hates and fears his own desire for freedom remains utterly enslaved. The child who hates and fears his own dislike of his parents remains utterly enslaved.

Emotions are the empiricism of values – defences are the religion of subjugation.

To become authentic – to become who you truly are – requires slowing down.

When the phone rings, and you see the call display, invoking guilt-ridden or self-recriminatory defences is the most fundamental self-rejection that you are capable of.

The insecure and enslaved man says: “I must not feel this way!”

The man who has at least a chance for freedom asks: “I wonder why I feel this way?”

In religious terms, the enslaved man says: “I must not doubt there is a God!”

The man who can be free asks: “I wonder why I feel there is no God?”

The Facts of Your Feelings

All I am talking about – like any competent empiricist – is working with the facts.

The facts of your feelings.

Working with the facts of your feelings does not mean treating them as epistemological absolutes. Emotions do not equal knowledge any more than our senses equal the scientific method.

Propaganda will always seek to inflict negative moral judgments on your authentic emotional responses.

Remember, earlier in this book, we talked about how false answers are the exact opposite of true curiosity – and so knowledge.

When faced with the reality of our feelings: “I do not want to talk to my parents” – it is an utterly false answer to “explain” those feelings away by saying: “Because I am a bad person.” It makes about as much sense as saying, “I want to masturbate because I am tempted by the devil.” It is a mad fiction designed to set you at war against yourself and so have you remain enslaved to those who define such false “morality.”

In any science – in any rational philosophy – the real, honest, productive and true response to any new information is curiosity.

If you stand at the port in Lisbon in the 15^th century, watching the Santa Maria sailing off across the Atlantic Ocean, and see the hull slowly disappear “into” the ocean – and then the lower masts, and then the “crow’s nest” – you can either make up an “explanation” – “OMG Poseidon, like, totally ate that ship!” - or you can admit a lack of knowledge, and remain curious.

“I wonder what happened to the ship?”

Making up an answer will keep you mired in a stupid, exploitive and destructive state of piggish ignorance.

Retaining your curiosity may lead you to the truth: that the world is round.

Your eyes provide you an objective experience of what is happening – that the ship appears to be slowly “descending” into the water.

Based on this empirical information – what do you do? Do you make up an answer, or do you explore the question?

When the phone rings and you look at the call display, your emotions provide you clear and empirical information about your relationships.

Based on this empirical information – what do you do? Do you make up an answer (“I am a selfish child!”) or do you explore the question (“I wonder why I dislike it when my parents call…”)?

Propaganda and Motivation

Whenever we are conflicted, it is almost always because we have a genuine desire that does not serve the needs of others – and we have been trained to believe that our genuine desires are always “wrong.”

Our genuine desire – “I do not want to talk to my parents” – does not serve the needs of our parents.

In other words, we must have a desire to satisfy the needs of our parents – by attacking our own genuine desire as “wrong.”

This creates a truly terrible contradiction within us. Our genuine desires are “wrong” – but our artificial “desires” (to please our parents) are “right.” Thus our desires are both “right” and “wrong” simultaneously.

Are we supposed to value our desires? Are we supposed to reject them? Who knows? All that is known is that we can waste our entire lives attempting to unravel these mad contradictions.

Power Versus Pleasure

If you do not want to talk to me, but I want to talk to you, then I have two basic options.

I can either ask you openly and with curiosity why you do not want to talk to me – with the goal of making our relationship more positive, enjoyable and productive for you – or, I can attack you for not wanting to talk to me.

In other words, I can either be the “free market,” or I can be the government.

If I genuinely want to create real value for you in our relationship, ask you how our relationship can better serve your needs, remain open to self-correction and improvement, and thank you for bringing up any criticisms of me – and in addition make genuine and successful efforts to change – then clearly I am a valuable person to have around.

In other words, if I care about your feelings, then we do genuinely have a relationship, and so it can be improved.

On the other hand, if I do not care about your feelings, but rather only care about managing my own anxieties, then it would be very unlikely that you would ever want to talk to me in the first place, since no one really enjoys being a Band-Aid for rampant narcissism.

If I am only really bothered by my own feelings of being rejected, rather than your feelings of dissatisfaction, then it is all about me, of course.

If, then, I keep calling you and keep getting your answering machine, I am going to feel a steady escalation of anxiety, because you are clearly communicating your lack of desire to talk to me.

You are implicitly communicating to me your dissatisfaction with your side of our relationship. You are openly “saying” to me: “I am not taking pleasure in your company.”

If I believe – as most people do – that you “owe” me a relationship – or even just an explanation – then any hesitancy, reticence or avoidance on your part will make me angry, just as if you were refusing to repay a legitimate debt.

You cannot reasonably call up your bank manager and say that you are feeling “resentment” towards the mortgage and so you are just not going to pay it – but that you are also going to keep the house.

Your parents very likely have the same approach to you – they have given you “the house” (life and your childhood), and now you owe them the “mortgage payments” of time, love and resources until the day they die.

Since you cannot give back “the house,” avoiding your parents is the same as stealing from them – and will be met with the same passive or aggressive hostility that anyone would express if you refused to repay a legitimate debt.

I myself experience this from time to time with listeners who criticize me on various grounds. I offer to have a conversation with them over the Internet – or by phone, if they want – and yet they often come up with endless streams of excuses as to why this cannot happen. Their parents will hear, they don’t have a microphone, they don’t have time, their cell phone is too expensive, etc.

I do smile when I hear all of this nonsense, and imagine whether they would have the same set of excuses if returning a phone call were to net them $1 million, or whether if a cute girl or guy wanted their number, they would say the same things.

Of course not! J

I do not get particularly angry with these people, because they certainly do not “owe” me a phone call. I would prefer it if they told me the truth – but of course they do not “owe” me the truth either!

I simply take note of their behaviour and come to my conclusion, which is that I will not bother talking to them if they do not want to talk to me.

Follow the Benefit…

When you are conflicted, your genuine emotional response is at war with the propaganda that has been inflicted upon you for the benefit of others.

But – how can you tell your genuine feelings from your propagandized defenses?

Ah, that’s easy!

The first thing that you feel is your always genuine emotion – the reaction is always the propaganda.

In the example above, when the phone rings, you experience a sinking sensation, followed by a dull litany of self-recrimination.

The sinking sensation is your genuine emotion – the negative self-judgment that follows is the propaganda.

Secondly, all you have to do is play the game called “Follow the Benefit.”

Whenever forensic accountants are examining a fraud or embezzlement, they always “follow the money.”

In the same way, when you are attempting to untangle your healthy flesh from your scar tissue – your true feelings from your propaganda – all you need to do is “Follow the Benefit.”

If your initial emotion is that you do not want to talk to your parents, then clearly you will benefit from not picking up the phone.

However, when we begin to understand this process, it becomes clear that the phone call has actually begun long before we pick up the receiver.

Since we do not want to pick up the phone, it must be someone else who wants us to pick it up, if we end up answering the call.

In this example, clearly there are only two parties in the interaction. Since you will not benefit from picking up the phone – since you don’t want to – clearly, the guilt and negative self-talk that you experience on the heels of your initial desire to avoid your mother – must come from your mother.

Follow the benefit…

In the same way, if you ever dream of a life free from income tax, the guilt and negative self-talk that you experience on the heels of your desire for freedom clearly does not benefit you – thus it must benefit others. (For a hint, glance at any ballot.)

Win/lose. You win, your mother loses. Your mother wins, you lose.

In positive and mature relationships – in other words, in voluntary relationships – win/lose interactions are utterly unsustainable.

In relationships that are either objectively or subjectively involuntary (state, religion and family), win/lose interactions are the norm.

Culture, Propaganda and Exploitation

Propaganda – culture, as we understand it – is entirely designed to create and sustain win/lose interactions.

Honesty is the most essential virtue, because without lies exploitation is impossible.

Slaves, as we have discussed, express their hostility to their masters through an excess of grudging obedience.

In the same way, you will answer the phone when your parents call, but you will do a bad job of even pretending to enjoy the conversation.

This is how you attempt to “explain” your enslavement to them.

This, however, keeps you in chains.

And now we will talk about how to become free.

Becoming Free:

Real-Time Relationships In Action

The Alternative to Grudging Compliance…

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is actually quite simple – assuming that you are not subject to direct coercion.

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is not to try and talk your owners into setting you free.

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is not to try and talk your fellow slaves into joining your rebellion.

If you are a slave and you want to become free, the solution is very simple.

Very terrifying, but very simple.

If you are a slave, and you want to become free, the solution is simply this:

Stop acting like a slave!

What does this look like?

Slaves are not allowed to tell the truth. Slaves are not allowed to offend their masters. Slaves are not allowed to express preferences. Slaves must always manage their masters. Slaves must always be on guard. Slaves must always shy away from punishment.

Slaves must always fear their fellow slaves.

Slaves are not allowed to feel curiosity.

Slaves are not allowed to feel genuine emotion.

Slaves can only react to propaganda.

So if you don’t want to be a slave, stop acting like a slave.

This is the core of the Real-Time Relationship (RTR).

The Real-Time Relationship (RTR)

The reason that I call it the RTR is because it is all about telling other people in the moment how you feel.

Slaves are not allowed to tell the truth.

So – you start off by telling the truth.

If you don’t want to be a slave, when the dreaded name lights up the call display, you pick up the phone and say to your mother:

“Hi, mom. Do you know – the most interesting thing just happened – your name showed up on my call display and I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach, a kind of dread, or nervousness, and a desire to avoid picking up the phone.”

And then, you say nothing.

Nothing at all.

You must be free to say what you truly think and feel – and your mother must be free to respond as she sees fit.

Just as it is essential for your mother to know your true thoughts and feelings, so it is essential that you know your mother’s genuine response to your true thoughts and feelings.

Picture speaking this honestly to your mother – picture being that honest.

What does that make you feel?

Dread? Fear? Terror?

Hopelessness? Despair?

Like walking off a cliff?

That is your enslavement weeping.

That is your propaganda shrieking.

That is your mother speaking.

But if you want to stop being a slave, stop acting like a slave.

You feel terror – but really, what are you so afraid of?

Can your mother beat you now? Does she have total control over you, now that you are an adult?

Can she lock you in your room and deny you dinner?

Of course not.

So – I ask you again: what are you so afraid of?

The Core of Fear

I can tell you, if you like – but you already know the answer of course.

You are afraid of being revealed as a slave – not to your mother, who already knows – but to yourself.

The worst and most terrifying aspect of slavery is that you have to pretend that you are not a slave.

When you look at the history of genuine slavery, it was never justified in terms of force, but rather in terms of Christian benevolence, the mental retardation of the slaves, the “white man’s burden,” the need to save the souls of the savages and so on.

In other words, the people called “slaves” were not really slaves, any more than a baby is a “slave.”

The mythology went something like this:

These “slaves” are only owned because they lack the capacity for self-ownership. They are controlled for the same reason that a child wandering into traffic must be controlled. These savage fools are terrible dangers to themselves – they cannot handle freedom. If given their liberty, they would act out a terrible orgy of self-destruction, sexual abandon and brute violence.

And the same is considered true of us, in our “democracies.”

A terrible trap was thus set up for those who were subjugated…

If they obeyed the will of their masters, they were “good” – and “liberated” from their own tendency toward self-destruction. If they disobeyed the will of their masters, they were “evil,” “irresponsible,” “willful,” etc.

Thus: “slavery equals freedom,” and “freedom equals slavery.”

Slavery and Freedom

The moment that slaves see themselves as slaves, they immediately begin to become free.

The true equation for freedom – the thunderous power that shatters the chains of the slaves – is the simple statement: slavery equals slavery.

Thus the greatest danger for slave-owners is that they will lose control of the moral definitions of “slavery” and “freedom.”

However, they are in constant danger of losing control of these definitions, because of the rank hypocrisy involved in any form of human ownership or control, and because, deep down, the slaves yearn and burn to be free!

Reason, empiricism, science and simple experience are always dissolving the chains of mankind.

Chains must be constantly re-forged, strengthened, reinforced – they rust by the minute.

We can see this in the world of “democracy,” insofar as people are considered to be violent, greedy, evil, short-sighted and so on – yet somehow magically possess the wisdom and foresight to elect people who will force them to be “good.”

Without a government, so the mythology goes, we would all tear each other to pieces.

Human beings are by nature evil and violent – thus we should give a small monopoly of people who want to use violence to achieve their ends (the state) a monopoly over the use of force, and an endless ability to escape the consequences of their actions.

However, the truth that we all experience in reality, on a daily basis, is fear not of our fellow drivers, but of the police car. The violence that we are threatened with is not mugging, raping or home invasion, but rather jail for non-payment of taxes or disobeying the whims of our masters. What is more likely – that we will be robbed by a criminal, or that our money will lose its value through political inflation?

The supposed predations of our fellow citizens are almost nowhere to be seen – it is the state that controls the money supply, the army, the police, the guns, the bombs, the attack helicopters, the long-range bombers, the nuclear weapons – and the prisons.

True freedom would be a disaster, we are told – nature red in tooth and claw – and thus enslavement to our masters is real “freedom.”

In the same way, parents define slavery as “virtue” – despite the endless hypocrisies of this mad reversal.

The Hypocrisy of “Consideration”…

To understand why we are so blind to our own enslavement as adults, we need to understand how we are first enslaved as children.

As always, our enslavement begins with moral hypocrisies inflicted upon us by those in authority.

Parents will always call us “selfish” if we fail to act on the basis of their emotional preferences.

If your mother wants to talk to you, and you do not want to talk to her, then you are “selfish” if you choose not to talk to her.

This is a mad moral mythology which is utterly unraveled by a moment’s thought.

We are taught “consideration” not as a mere personal preference on the part of our parents, but rather as an objective and absolute moral principle.

If “consideration for the feelings of others” is thus such an axiomatic and universal moral value, then clearly it must at least apply equally to both parents and their adult children.

“It is good to be sensitive to the feelings of others,” sayeth our parents. “It is bad to perform actions which cause unhappiness in others.”

We swallow this as a moral absolute – and thus feel guilt whenever we violate this principle.

The Key to the Cell

Ah, but if “consideration” is in fact a universal principle, a moral absolute, then it binds our parents as surely as it binds us.

So…

If it is bad to cause discomfort in other people, and you feel discomfort when your mother calls, surely, when you tell her about your discomfort, she should feel bad, and want to change her behaviour.

If your mother apologizes for her lack of consideration, asks you what would make you feel better, then you can rest assured that she did not inflict the moral principle of “consideration” in order to control and bully you, but rather because she genuinely wanted you to be good – and that she knew all about goodness, because she practised moral behaviour herself.

When you report your discomfort to your mother, what do you think she will really do?

You already know the answer, because you have not told her the truth.

If your brother constantly lectures you about the need for financial responsibility – and mocks and berates you whenever you use a credit card or spend “too much” – how do you feel when he borrows money from you, and then avoids you when the time comes for repayment?

What is thus revealed about your brother’s use of the term “responsibility“?

Did he inflict negative judgments on you because he genuinely understands the value of responsibility through his own personal practice of it?

Or – did he inflict negative judgments on you because he is a self-righteous hypocrite who uses the word “responsibility” to control and demean other people?

You know everything you need to know – if you want to stop being a slave, you just need to stop avoiding your knowledge.

Testable Hypocrisy?

Perhaps you disagree with me, though, and say that you do not know the answers to these questions.

No problem!

I think we can certainly agree that it is important to know the answer to the question, “Was ‘morality’ used to control and demean me?”

If you genuinely believe that you lack answers to these questions, the test is embarrassingly simple – and reveals everything we need to know about what we already in fact know.

If your mother tells you that you should pick up the phone because you are supposed to be “considerate,” and not create negative feelings in her, how do you think she will react when you tell her the truth about the negative feelings that she is creating in you?

When you tell your mother that you feel a strong desire to avoid her phone calls, will she apologize for her own lack of sensitivity towards your feelings?

Will she ask you to tell her more about how you feel, so that you can get to the root of the issue, so that you can end up with a better experience of your relationship?

Will she ask you when you first experienced these emotions towards her?

Will she patiently support you as you peel back layer after layer of negative experience, which resulted in your desire to avoid her calls?

There is absolutely no possibility that she will do that.

None whatsoever.

Not a shred of a chance.

It will never, ever happen.

It is functionally, logically and emotionally completely and totally impossible.

How can I be so confident?

Do I know your mother?

No, but I know philosophy.

This is why it is impossible.

The Impossibility of Adult Reciprocity

If your mother were to take this course of action when you admitted your desire to avoid her calls – if she were to be truly curious about the root causes of your negative feelings – she would have a great challenge on her hands.

She would have an impossible time explaining one simple thing.

Why has she never known how you feel?

Since the roots of your desire to avoid your mother go back many, many years, how is it possible that your mother has no idea that she was inflicting any kind of negative experience upon you?

There are really only two ways that this could have come about.

Your mother knew that you were not having any fun in the relationship – and utterly ignored that reality for the sake of her own needs – which scarcely supports the theory that she values “consideration for the feelings of others” as any sort of objective or universal value.

Alternatively, she can claim that she had no idea that you had not been enjoying your relationship with her for many, many years – which means that she took no real interest in your true feelings, or rejected you if and when you honestly told her how you felt in the past.

Naturally, since we do prefer to tell the truth to each other, she must also be able to explain why you felt it necessary to hide your negative experiences from her.

Now, if your mother took no interest in your true feelings throughout the history of your relationship, it becomes very hard for her to argue that “consideration for the feelings of others” is a great virtue, since we generally do not enjoy it when other people who claim to love us take no interest in our feelings – in fact, that is a horrible experience.

Furthermore, I can completely guarantee that if you take no interest in your mother’s feelings, she will be very hurt and upset – and possibly attack you to boot!

Thus, if she claims that she had no idea that you were having any kind of negative experiences in relation to her, then clearly she was taking no interest in your feelings. Since that is behaviour that both angers and upsets her, she is openly revealed as a multi-decade complete and total hypocrite who used moral arguments to control, manipulate and subjugate you to satisfy her own narcissistic needs.

In other words, she was a total bitch and a contemptible hypocrite.

Sort of a deal-breaker for anyone with any self-esteem.

Now, if you did genuinely end up hiding your feelings from your mother – which allows her to claim that she did not know what they were – there is only one reason why you would have done that.

You did that because your mother rejected what you truly felt – and attacked you for your feelings as well.

It is very hard for someone to argue that you should be considerate towards other people’s feelings, while rejecting and attacking the feelings that you have if they are inconvenient or negative to that person.

It would be the same as me arguing that you should always pay back your debts, no matter what the hardship – and then, after borrowing money from you, criticizing you for being “cheap” when you had the temerity to ask me to repay the loan.

It would be a sickening, stomach-turning display of bottomless and manipulative hypocrisy.

If your mother were to admit any of these things, she would be revealed as a horrendous and destructive person who plied you with “moral” lies in order to exploit you for her own narcissistic needs based on your very desire to be a good child and please her.

Using false moral arguments to exploit children based on their desire to be good is the very core of corruption and evil.

Following the Maternal Benefit

Let us “follow the benefit” in this case as well.

If your mother is this type of person, then remaining obedient to her wishes is to be enslaved to corruption.

Clearly, identifying your mother as corrupt and manipulative – if that is what she is – benefits you enormously.

Who, though, does it not benefit?

Why, your mother of course!

This is what I mean when I say that slavery is defined as the avoidance of the knowledge that you are a slave.

Slavery is also defined as the desire for passive revenge upon your masters.

And this is why we lie to them, and pretend to feel what we do not feel, and refuse to be honest about what we do feel.

Self-delusion is the lie that is always inflicted upon masters by their slaves.

Freedom from slavery is nothing more – or less – then a commitment to honesty, which is also a letting go of the desire for vengeance.

RTR and Empiricism

The Real-Time Relationship is about empiricism and curiosity – fundamentally, it is the scientific method applied to our relationships.

Diagnosis

If your back hurts, you go to a physiotherapist. The physiotherapist will gently press upon your spine in order to localize and identify the problem. She will ask you, over and over, “Does it hurt here?”

She presses upon nerves to find out if they hurt.

That is how she identifies where the problem exists.

You can of course avoid going to a physiotherapist – or any other health practitioner – and simply take painkillers to alleviate the symptoms. This is a clear example of preferring immediate avoidance over long-term solutions – scarcely the mark of a mature or responsible person.

In the same way, the reason that you pick up the phone with your mother and pretend to “enjoy” the conversation is that you prefer the short-term relief of empty compliance over actually pressing a nerve ending to see if it hurts, so that you can identify the source of the problem and work towards a practical and permanent cure.

Our nerve endings signal discomfort – just as your “sinking sensation” signals discomfort – but by picking up the phone and avoiding the truth, you are simply masking the symptom, rather than dealing with the problem.

Again, this approach is fundamentally religious, in that you are making up instant “answers” rather than examining the empirical evidence with curiosity and rationality.

Naturally, if we are not allowed to tell the truth in a relationship, and we are consistently bullied into pretending to be something other than who we are, we will not enjoy that relationship – because in fact, it is not a relationship at all, but rather a mutual exploitation based on immediate anxiety avoidance.

Thus our sinking sensation is clearly communicating to us that we do not enjoy this interaction.

We are perfectly aware of why we do not enjoy our relationship with our mother, which is that we are not allowed to tell her the truth – primarily, we are not allowed to tell her that we do not enjoy our relationship with her.

Thus our emotions are putting forward a theory – that our mother will attack us if we are honest with her – and if we wish to establish the validity or invalidity of this theory, all we need to do is be honest with her.

If we are honest with our mother – if we say: “I do not want to talk to you, and I do not know exactly why, and I have been feeling this for many years,” and our mother responds with genuine concern and curiosity, then our “sinking sensation” was more paranoia than accuracy.

If, on the other hand, she reacts with irritation, dismissal, avoidance, redirection, attack, or an over solicitous and cloying “concern for what’s wrong,” then our emotional thesis is amply confirmed.

The simple fact of the matter, of course, is that if our mother did have a habit of genuinely responding to our distress with curiosity and concern, we would never have any kind of “sinking sensation” when she called.

In the case of long-term relationships, the feeling is the proof.

There is no possibility whatsoever that a positive long-term relationship can exist if one or both parties is regularly feeling bad about talking to the other party.

Paranoia?

If your mother says or implies that you are “paranoid” for feeling anything negative about her calls, then not only is she rejecting and attacking your feelings (hence their negativity) but also she is the kind of person who is perfectly happy to continue for years talking to a paranoid person without once productively addressing that paranoia.

That is, sadly, in no way the mark of a healthy person.

Why is it, then, that we avoid putting our emotional theory to the test?

Well, if we avoid putting a theory to the test it is because we know the answer to that test, and we do not like it. This is one reason why religious people always avoid a rational examination of the existence of God, and always fall back on “faith,” which is defined in reality as a willed bigotry in what is known to be false.

If our emotions tell us that we will be attacked for telling the truth – and we have not been telling the truth – it is because we wish to avoid confirmation – i.e. certainty.

If we wish to “avoid” certainty, it is because we are already certain.

Thus it is not really “certainty” that we wish to avoid, but the results of accepting what we already know to be true.

The superstitious cultist who goes to church does not avoid rationally examining the question of the existence of God because he is certain that God exists, but rather because he is certain that God does not exist at all. What he truly wishes to avoid is not the knowledge of God’s nonexistence, but rather the inevitable results of that knowledge, which is the end of his association with his cult, and the inevitable attacks that will descend upon him from his fellow cult members. He also fears the contempt and hostility in his children’s eyes that will inevitably result from his recognition of the truth, since he inflicted his superstition upon them with pious self-righteousness when they were young, helpless and utterly dependent. He is also afraid to put his wife’s love to the test, because he knows exactly what will happen if he says to her: “Will you love me and the truth, or will you reject me out of fear and enslavement to our fellow cultists, if I reject falsehood?”

He already knows what her answer will be.

He already knows exactly where he sits on her hierarchy of “values.”

He already knows that his wife will kick him to the curb the moment he speaks the truth.

Thus it is not the absence of God that he fears and avoids, but the consequences of speaking the truth – and the knowledge that he has wasted his life in a squalid, corrupt cult of liars and bullies – and even worse, that he has sacrificed his children’s intelligence and integrity on the altar of his own cowardice.

Truly, to look into the mirror with such accuracy, and to see what he had truly become, would be more than his soul could possibly bear.

And so he struggles on, avoiding the truth, at war with himself, murdering his honest instincts every single day, proselytizing to helpless children and credulous fools that which he knows to be false, until nature finally takes pity upon him and puts him out of his agony with an empty and prayed-for death.

Of course for the religious, death leads to paradise, because their life is a living hell – compared to which the mere nonexistence that we all know awaits us in the grave seems like a blissful heaven.

Exploring the Facts

The simple fact is that God does not exist.

The simple fact is that “the government” is just a bunch of pompous goons with guns ordering you around, filling your children’s heads with lies, and stealing from you.

The simple fact is that you do not want to talk to your mother on the telephone.

And the simple fact is that we know exactly what will happen when we speak the truth.

We will be attacked by our fellow slaves.

We will not be invited to become a master.

And thus we shall be alone.

This is the deepest horror of living among the slaves – that the very communal power that could overturn our masters is not turned against our masters, but rather against any slave who dares to say: “We are slaves.”

We have a State because we are the State.

The shock and loathsomeness of this understanding – that we have no masters but each other – is the real horror that we avoid with our blank, smiling conformity.

This is the real reason that we make up “answers,’ and believe our own lies, crush our natural hunger for truth and freedom, attack anyone who makes us uncomfortable, attack the “enemies” that we are told to hate, and lick the boots of our owners in happy, cringing abandon.

We are not ruled by masters.

We are ruled by each other.

The “masters” simply pick up the pieces.

These are the simple facts that we know deep down. These are the simple facts that are carved into our very bones.

These are the simple facts that we will waste our lives evading if we do not find the courage to speak the truth.

Barriers to the Truth

Before you implement what we will talk about below, I think it only fair to remind you that if any of your relationships survive your honesty, you will be in a tiny minority.

Before exposing yourself to this light, it is essential to be aware of the simple fact that when your eyes have adjusted to the brightness of this new world, almost everyone around you will have vanished.

Our theory – our instinctual knowledge – is that we will be attacked and reviled for speaking the truth.

If our theory is true, then this is exactly what will happen.

Let me be more specific.

If this theory – and my experience, and the experience of thousands of other people in this philosophical conversation – is true, then you will be attacked and reviled for speaking the truth.

You will be snarled at, dismissed, waved off, condescendingly lectured to, called a fool, a cultist, a traitor, a disinformation agent – angry, paranoid, selfish, ungrateful, deluded, psychotic, insane – and fat, believe it or not!

There will be no end to the vituperation and invective that will be hurled at you.

People live in the darkness, scurrying and biting and gnawing at scraps, and each other – but they have an amazing sensitivity to light – probably because it will reveal their highly unflattering reflections.

When people sense the light of truth approaching, they snarl and growl and attack. They shed all self-restraint, all pretense of dignity, any vestige of “self-respect.” They attack with lies, with anger, with misrepresentation, with “confusion,” with scorn, with contempt, with eye-rolling – and thankfully, in the end, with ostracism.

They attack with the ferocity of cornered rats because they imagine that the threat comes from you, not from their own hearts.

By odd coincidence, at the very moment that I was writing this section, my podcast show got a new review on PodFeed – the first in months.

Useless moralism (1 star)

By: Daniella

This guy is an inadequate philosopher and neocheater. His philosophy is religious. What drives him is the quest to be morally pure. All his positions revolve around the quest to keep his hands clean and try to manipulate others to be convinced that he's a moral authority to be looked upon with awe. He is of no use to society. Don't bother.

Reviewed on 12/23/2007

I must confess to being quite fascinated by the term “neocheater,” which I have never heard before! I certainly do agree, of course, that I am no use to “society,” since it is an exploitive lie.

Working with the Facts…

Of course, I am not telling you anything about the people around you that you do not already know.

The truth is such a beautiful, wonderful and liberating thing that if people surrender it to lies, we know that it must be because they are subjected to the greatest possible duress, the most extreme threats.

We also know that people in societies that are generally more free (i.e. where they are not jailed or killed for criticizing the system) believe almost as many exploitive lies as those in societies that are less free.

Thus political freedom is not the primary factor in gauging how many lies people will believe.

Since direct threats of physical destruction or enslavement are not required for people to believe all sorts of horrible moral lies – indeed, such lies would be impossible if they required such threats – there must be another factor that drives the conformity of mankind.

Criminal Slaves

It is a tried and true principle of homicide investigations that when a husband or wife goes missing, the first suspect is always the spouse.

Whenever a crime is committed, look first to those closest to the victim.

To unravel the riddle of the enslavement of the many by the few, our first suspects cannot be the masters, but must be the slaves.

This we all know deep down.

We know that the truth is a beautiful and liberating thing – a trophy that we hunger for, yearn for, love hopelessly, desperately, at a distance, secretly – and that we cannot ever speak the truth at all.

I am here to tell you that what you fear is all true.

You cannot speak the truth to those around you.

You know exactly what they will do to you.

But you do not really know this yet – not where it counts, not in the place that will propel you into real action, into real escape, towards real freedom!

Dare I say – towards the future? J

There is only one way to find out whether our fears about speaking the truth are a valid assessment of imminent danger, or rampant and self-indulgent paranoia.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this…

Speak the Truth

Yes, it really is that simple.

That simple, and that hard.

If you think that I am full of nonsense, or that I am wildly overstating the case, or that I am writing more of a self-indulgent manifesto than a rational call to action, I am perfectly fine with that!

I actually think that is a very healthy approach to take to what I am saying.

Scepticism is enormously healthy because scepticism requires both logic and empirical validation to be transformed into acceptance.

Fortunately, you have access to all the logic and empirical validation you could ever desire – today, right now, this minute!

For the logic, you can turn to my two previous books, and my podcasts.

For empirical validation, things are much easier.

You do not need to buy and study any books. Thank heavens, you do not need to listen to a near-infinite series of podcasts. You do not need to learn ancient Aramaic, how to juggle, ride a unicycle, or breathe water.

You only need to open your mouth.

Integrity in Honesty

If you really do dislike it when your mother’s name shows up on your call display, you may well be tempted to yank the phone off its handle and yell at her that she is a fellow slave who is keeping you down, that she bullies you like a cornered rat, and she serves the masters who rule us all!

Not only would this be unwise, it would also be dishonest.

The fact of the matter is that you do not know for certain the validity of these theories.

I am not asking you to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that these theories are true.

I think that would be a very bad idea.

The truth of the matter – as it stands for you, right now – is that you genuinely do not know why you cannot speak the truth with your mother.

Earlier, we talked about a 15^th century man watching a ship on an ocean descend slowly over the horizon. That observation is the fact that he is working with – he does not as yet have a theory as to why that phenomenon is occurring.

If this man simply started yelling at people that the world was round, whizzing around the sun at 30 km a second, that the sun was the center of the solar system, and is also whizzing along at terrifying speeds – for a combined planetary motion of 900 km/s – everyone would think that he was just mad! They would be right in that evaluation too, since he would have no theoretical or empirical proof for what could only be considered entirely wild propositions!

You have a fact to work with in your relationship with your mother, which is that you do not like it when her name lights up your call display.

You do not know exactly why that “sinking sensation” is occurring.

I have put forward a theory as to why that sensation is occurring – and the likely events that will unfold if you speak the truth.

However, it remains as yet only a theory.

It is a theory, of course, that should give you some great comfort – despite the anxiety it provokes.

If the theory is true, then you have damn good reasons for staying silent, for conforming, for refraining from speaking the truth – and for lying to yourself about why.

It makes little sense to hide if you are not being hunted.

I am telling you that you hide because you are being hunted – but this has not been proven, and therefore must be put to the test.

Your test.

So – call your mother.

Tell her that you feel unease – or a sinking sensation, or anxiety, or whatever it is – when her name lights up your call display.

That’s pretty terrifying, isn’t it?

Good.

Feel the burn!

I mean – you don’t want to go through the rest of your short life utterly deluded about the content and quality of your “relationships,” do you?

Since you yearn and burn for the truth – as we all do – don’t you want to find out if your relationships can support it?

Since you yearn and burn for love – which requires the truth, as we have discussed – don’t you want to find out if your relationships can support it?

Since you yearn and burn for intimacy, integrity, trust and devotion – all of which require the truth – don’t you want to find out if your relationships can support them?

If your existing relationships will not only never give you what you want, but exist only to rob you blind, don’t you want to stop wasting your life?

Now you can.

So – all you have to do is tell your mother how you feel.

When you are talking to her – particularly for the first time – you cannot with certainty tell her that you know exactly why you are feeling what you are feeling. Yes, she might frighten you with unconscious or subtle threats of attack or abandonment – but you have no real evidence of that as yet! Thus it would be entirely unjust – and abusive – to attack her with conclusions when you have as yet only facts.

Conclusions and Facts

The fact is that you feel anxiety when your mother calls you. The Real-Time Relationship concept demands that we are honest with each other by speaking the facts of our experience.

Not the mythologies, not the stories, not the blame, not the conclusions – just the facts.

The fact is that you feel anxiety – and you do not know why you feel this anxiety.

So what do you say to your mother?

You tell her the truth.

Nothing more, nothing less.

You say: “Mom, I feel a strange anxiety when you call – I don’t know why, I’m not saying it’s anything that you are doing, but I have felt it for quite some time – many years, actually as far back as I can remember. I’m not saying that this is your fault, because I don’t know where it comes from – I’m just telling you what I feel.”

And that’s all that you say, because that’s all that you know for sure.

Avoiding “Story Time”

You will be greatly tempted – and your mother will doubtless tempt you with this as well – to blame your mother, so that you can both take a mutual dive off the cliff of “story time.”

The way that we do this is to inflict a conclusion on someone else.

Thus we are sorely tempted to say: “Mom, I feel a strange anxiety when you call, because you are always so critical!”

Do you see the difference? Do you catch the difference between the first speech, and the second?

The first speech is an honest expression of your emotional state – feedback in real-time to the person that you are talking to about your immediate experience.

The second sentence is a conclusion – easily recognizable by the terrible use of the word “because.”

“Because” is a word that indicates a shift from experience to thesis.

Our historical friend in Lisbon, who watches the ship disappearing over the horizon, can honestly turn to someone and say: “Hey, I see that ship disappearing slowly over the horizon, hull first!” That is a true statement of his direct experience in the moment – no one can reasonably tell him that he is wrong.

The moment that he provides an explanation, however, he is open to criticism.

If he says: “The ship is disappearing slowly into the ocean because it is being swallowed up by Poseidon,” now he is in the realm of story time, since he has just made up an “explanation” for which he has no direct evidence.

Thus when you say to your mother: “I feel anxiety because you are so critical,” you are stating knowledge and certainty of a causal relationship for which you have no direct evidence.

It may be true that your mother is hypercritical – it may be true that she has attacked you for years, every single time that she calls – your thesis may be entirely true, but the problem is that you have absolutely no evidence in the moment.

This is how we so often shoot ourselves in the foot when we attempt to be honest with others.

If you say to your mother that your anxiety is caused by her critical nature, what is she going to say?

Come on, you know it exactly.

She is going to say, of course: “I am not critical.”

And what do you say in return?

You say: “You are too so critical! Like – every time we talk, you say that I sound tired…”

And so on.

And what happens with that conversation?

You argue and debate and provide evidence and deny and attack – and never talk about your true feelings at all.

Do you see how presenting conclusions is simply a massive avoidance mechanism which allows you to debate endlessly about inconsequential details that cannot be proved, rather than talk about your actual experience of your mother?

Stories can be debated endlessly – witness the endless idiocy of medieval scholasticism, or modern theological or political debates – because stories are not real.

You say that your mother is critical, and she replies that she is not – that she just has your best interests at heart, that you can be careless or irresponsible, that she never said that, or that if she did you misinterpreted it, that you have always been so sensitive, that you must be tired now, that she has always tried to do her best, that motherhood is not easy, that she doesn’t understand why the younger generation behaves the way it does, that things weren’t like that when she was your age, that you’re not a parent, you’ll understand when you are a parent – and so on and so on and so on.

Round and round and round…

A massive, cumbersome, convoluted, baffling, frustrating, empty bag of Gordian knots that no sane human being could ever unravel.

How many times has this happened in your relationship with your mother? How about your girlfriend? Boyfriend? Siblings? Friends?

When we experience a negative emotion, we are unbelievably and inevitably tempted to place the blame for that emotion on someone else, by creating an untestable mythology that defines their actions as causing our response.

And it never, ever gets us anywhere at all.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

T

The post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy is based upon the notion that simply because “B” happens after “A,” “A” caused “B.”

If I kill a goat, and then it starts to rain, it is completely irrational to say that the death of the goat caused the rain.

If I get angry when my wife says something, I cannot immediately prove that I got angry because my wife said something – all that I know for sure is that I felt anger after she spoke.

However, we are endlessly drawn to the fallacy of blaming others for our own feelings, because it is far easier than actually discussing our feelings in an open and vulnerable way.

Forever and a day, if you take the “blame” approach, you will be mired in dysfunctional, frustrating, empty, wasteful, negative “relationships.”

How many times do we feel that we are silently and invisibly “fencing” with someone else, where we are trying to pin the blame for our emotions on him, while he is struggling to evade our blame, and trying to turn it around and blame us?

We are priests arguing about dead gods.

We are wasting our lives fencing with ourselves.

And we deserve so much better.

But first we have to earn it.

Avoiding Mythology

When you take the RTR approach, you simply state the facts of your experience.

You do not make up reasons as to why you feel what you feel. You simply say: “I feel X.”

You can honestly say: “I felt X after you did Y. I am not saying that Y caused my feeling, I am simply saying that my feeling followed Y.”

This is the truth. It could be that your feeling was triggered by a situation that just happened to be similar to a traumatic or difficult situation in your childhood. This does not make you paranoid, just a sensitive person with a memory. A soldier who has returned from violent combat, and who ducks when a car backfires, is not paranoid, just painfully conditioned. He felt fear after the car backfired, but not because the car backfired – and we know this because other people did not feel fear when the car backfired.

The backfire was thus merely a catalyst, not a cause.

If it were an objective cause, then everyone would feel fear, not just him.

An objective cause of pain is “being stabbed” – a subjective cause of pain is “being embarrassed.” The first is based upon our objective physiology; the second upon our subjective interpretation. The first is a fact; the second is a story.

In the same way, you can legitimately say: “When you did X, I felt Y” – it is important, however, to continually remind the person that you are talking to that you are not saying that she caused your feeling.

Not only has that not been established logically or empirically, but even if it were established, it would still not be true, because unless someone is sticking a pin in your arm, they do not have the power to make you feel anything.

“Inflicting” Emotions

f you and I go on a first date and I spend the first five minutes yelling at you, you will of course be frightened, anxious and upset. There is no way to avoid this reaction, since your autonomous nervous system will react to my potential attack with a healthy dose of “fight or flight.”

Naturally, then, you will make your excuses, leave, and never see me again.

If you do choose to see me again, and I continue to yell at you, I am not making you feel bad, you are making you feel bad.

The first time that you put your hand in an open flame, it is the flame that burns you. If you voluntarily put your hand back into that open flame, it is now you who are burning yourself.

The way that we always end up in abusive relationships is that we simply ignore, reject, minimize or mythologize how those relationships make us feel initially.

As children, we are always taught to obey external rules rather than express our honest feelings.

Feelings destroy hierarchies – particularly unjust hierarchies.

Feelings instantly tell us whether a situation or interaction is good, bad, or indifferent for us.

When you were sitting in your classroom as a child, did you feel happy, bored, frustrated, angry or indifferent to be there?

When the teacher called on you, did you feel eager or nervous?

Did the teacher ever sit you down and ask you if there was any way that you could enjoy your learning experience more?

Private companies do this all the time – they are continually polling their customers to find out if there’s any conceivable way that their needs can be better served.

Did your teachers ever ask you how they could serve you better?

Did your parents?

This may sound odd, but it is very important to understand.

Quality of Service

I regularly ask my wife if there is anything that I can do to improve her experience of being married to me.

I can’t automatically tell if she is dissatisfied or unhappy about something – and I would far rather change my behaviour before those feelings arise – and so it is important to check in with her and make sure that everything is running smoothly.

Even if I am doing pretty much the same thing that I did a month ago, her needs or preferences might have changed in the interim. Sometimes, just asking the question can help uncover a new preference that she is not even fully aware that she has.

The reason that I want to talk about this aspect of a relationship is so that you understand that, as a child, you were almost never consulted about what you wanted.

When I say this, I’m not talking about things like “What do you want for Christmas?” or “What would you like for dinner?” – which you might have been asked, and which is all fine and dandy.

No, what I mean is not whether your preferences were solicited with regards to material objects, but rather with regards to the people around you.

As children, we are generally raised to conform to the preferences of those around us – though, as I talked about in my book “On Truth,” those preferences are almost always portrayed as moral absolutes – but we are not allowed to have any particular preferences of our own with regards to those around us.

Consultation

For instance, did your mother ever sit you down and say:

Is there any way that I could make your experience of being my child even more enjoyable? Is there anything that I am doing that you dislike, or that you don’t understand, or that you do not see the purpose of? Although I know that you disagree with me about certain decisions that I make for you in the moment – like “don’t eat that third candy bar” – do you understand those decisions later on, or do they remain confusing for you? Do you think that I am teaching you to follow sensible principles, for your own good, or do you find that you are merely obeying me in the moment? Overall, are you enjoying being my child? Would I be the mother that you would choose out of all the women in the world, if you could choose who was your mother? If not, why not?

Can you identify the emotion that wells up in your heart from even considering this kind of interview from one or both of your parents?

I’m telling you – this is what you need to feel to be safe, loved and happy now, and in the future.

Why is it so incomprehensible that our parents would ever ask us these sorts of questions, and ask us for honest feedback about their success as parents?

Why is it that our local pizza parlour will interview us to find out what kind of pizza we like – but our parents will never ask us what kind of parenting we like?

Do you see everything that is not being talked about in the world?

Do you see why people grow up to be so compliant, so fearful, so frustrated, so angry, so lonely – and so fundamentally cut off from their emotional experience of the world – and thus so sad in their very souls?

Muscles that we do not use inevitably atrophy.

Feelings that are never consulted inevitably go underground.

If your opinion is never sought – or if it is “sought,” but never acted on – you will simply cease experiencing opinions.

If your preferences are constantly rejected – which is always hypocritical, since to reject a preference is to express a preference – then you will simply cease experiencing preferences.

(Notice that I do not say that you will cease to have opinions or preferences – merely that you will cease to experience them.)

Whatever we accept as a general principle we inevitably end up implementing ourselves – thus if you grow up rejecting your own preferences and opinions, you will inevitably end up attacking, crushing and rejecting the preferences and opinions of others.

Particularly those who depend on you the most, such as your children, and your lover.

Identification and Self-Expression

It takes an enormous amount of work to first identify what we feel, and then learn how to express those feelings honestly.

Then it takes additional effort to truly understand the source of our feelings – the complex interaction of our ideas and our experiences of the world, and of others – and then it takes even more effort to accept the information and conclusions that our feelings provide us, and act upon them.

This complex dance is one of the greatest and most amazing experiences that life has to offer. Learning how to productively match the complexity of our inner experiences with the subtlety of our outer experiences is a truly magical journey.

Depth Right at the Surface

We so often feel that what is occurring for us emotionally in the very depths of our souls is somehow radically disconnected from the daily world that we live in.

When I first started going to therapy – I went for three hours a week for almost 2 years – I had a dream that I was being attacked by a hostile woman. I brought the dream in for analysis, spouting all this Jungian nonsense about how this angry woman was my animus, my female side and so on.

My therapist held up her hand and said: “Perhaps, but let’s start with something a little more simple. Did you talk to your mother yesterday?”

Of course I had – and of course my mother had attacked me.

This simple idea – an astounding revelation to me – that the depths of my unconscious was perfectly attuned to the realities of my daily experiences – completely changed how I viewed the value and purpose of my inner life.

As I continued in therapy, it became increasingly clear that my senses did not lie, and my unconscious did not lie – it was only my conscious mind, and my psychological defences, that were consistently and constantly misleading me through the endless invention of false narratives and imaginary cause-and-effect.

I was in fact a kind of “truth sandwich.” My senses told the truth; my dreams told the truth – but in the middle was my conscious ego, which lied and evaded constantly.

Your dreams, your instinctual emotions, your deepest and – as you think – most private experiences – are the greatest source of truth available to you, after your physical senses (and your greatest source of moral truth!).

Thus, learning to trust our instincts – rather than just “follow the rules” (even philosophical rules) is essential for living a happy, safe, loving and productive life.

However, due to the fact that as children our feelings and instincts are stifled, mocked and abused, it can take quite some time to become comfortable feeling them, let alone expressing them, understanding them and acting on them.

Feeling Your Feelings

Since the first challenge is learning how to feel your feelings, how can we approach that most productively?

First of all, you are already feeling your feelings.

Your initial impulse – the “stab” or “sinking feeling” – may be subtle, brief and fleeting, but I guarantee you that it is there.

The moment after you feel your feelings, your defences summon mythologies to label those feelings “bad,” and thus prevent you from communicating, understanding, or acting upon them.

This we all learned from the sick fantasies of religion – the mythology that certain impulses come from “the devil” and so are labeled “bad,” and so you must keep them to yourself – or perhaps confess them as a guilty secret – and thus never accept those feelings or act upon them.

Do you see the evil genius of religion?

Doubt in the truth of the fantasy of God comes from “the devil,” and thus is labeled “bad,” and so should never be communicated or acted upon.

Brilliant – simply brilliant!

Authenticity is evil; empty submission is virtue.

This is how the greatest predators feed!

Your First Feeling…

hen I was 19, I worked as a gold-panner and prospector in northern Canada for about 18 months, saving money to go to university.

Every couple of weeks, I would go into town, have a nice dinner and perhaps go to a disco.

One night, I started chatting up the prettiest woman at the bar. I found it rather difficult to talk to her, though, because she kept glancing around. We chatted for about 15 minutes – though her responses were mostly monosyllabic – and then she excused herself, because she wanted to go and talk to a friend.

I sat at the table for about 20 more minutes, not knowing if she was going to come back, feeling increasingly baffled and irritated. When she finally did return, she said she had to go. I asked her for her number – she sighed, and told me that she would prefer it if I gave her my number.

I did, and then spent the next day hoping that she would call.

Two nights later, after working out, I was sitting in a sauna, and realized that she hadn’t called me. I felt a stab of disappointment – which I immediately smothered by taking a deep, sudden breath and forcing myself to think of something else.

I had recently read my first book on psychology, and so, catching myself, I decided to relax, slow down my breathing, and actually feel my disappointment.

Shocking, I know! J

This began a lifelong process for me of re-learning how to trust my emotions.

It’s no fun to live life as if you are inhabited by some malevolent demon that is constantly “shooting you up” with random high-stimuli emotions that will inevitably mess you up in some manner.

Setting us at variance against ourselves is a prerequisite for exploitation.

A man at peace with himself cannot be exploited, except through direct violence, which the ruling classes quite sensibly shy away from.

A man at war with himself remains jittery, insecure, consumed with self-management, overeager for approval, unable to set boundaries, always available to work overtime. He feels generally unworthy of keeping his property, unable to challenge any of the moral rules that enslave him…

He lives a life of fear and self-subjugation.

It is this self-subjugation that breeds political, religious and tribal subjugation.

It is self-slavery that creates our masters.

We sell ourselves before we are bought by others.

Slowing Down...

Our defences work by creating a “rush to react,” which smothers our genuine instinctual and emotional responses.

Sitting in the sauna all those years ago, when I felt my stab of disappointment that the girl had not called me, I immediately began to make up excuses as to why my disappointment was invalid:

• Ahhh, it’s her loss.
• She wasn’t that pretty anyway.
• Maybe she lost my number.
• She might call.

Etc.

We all know these endless litanies of excuses that we invent to smother our genuine emotional reactions. We live life so frightened, so unstable, so consumed with self-management, that we become cheap lawyers, petty sophists – ready, willing and able to talk ourselves in and out of anything.

Self-manipulation is our medication.

Mythology is our drug.

The only cure is honesty.

When I made up “answers” in a “rush of reaction” to my genuine emotion, I was engaged in a fundamentally religious approach to reality.

I was not exhibiting any kind of curiosity about myself, about my emotional reaction to the girl not calling. I experienced a stimulus that I considered “negative” – and so just made up an “answer” to make the stimulus go away.

This is exactly the religious approach – when religious people experience “negative” stimuli, such as doubt, they make up answers to make the stimuli go away.

When we do not know where life came from, or how old the planet is, or what makes the lightning, we can either ask questions in all humility according to the scientific method - or we can just make up “answers” to wish our doubts away.

In the latter case, clearly we are not interested in establishing the truth, but rather in magically turning our ignorance into “truth.”

This habit is the eternal curse of our species.

When we are faced with the question “How are the children to be educated?”or “Who will build the roads?” saying, “Just give a bunch of guys a bunch of guns to make it happen,” is a complete and total non-answer.

When we are faced with the question, “Do my parents really love me?” saying, “Yes, because they tell me so,” is also a complete and total non-answer.

The Truth We Repress…

Once I began to explore my feelings of disappointment about the girl not calling, some fascinating insights began to arise.

First of all, it became clear to me over time that I was not disappointed in the fact that the girl had not called me, but rather I was frightened by my desire for a girl who would not call me.

I chose her in that bar because she was very pretty. I ignored the fact that she was quite rude, and was constantly looking around the disco while I was talking to her. I ignored the fact that she abruptly got up and talked to a friend of hers for 20 minutes, leaving me sitting in the booth, twiddling my thumbs and wondering whether I should stay or go. I ignored the fact that she gave me a very scant smile when I ask her for her number, and said, “Why don’t you just give me your number instead?”

In other words, the reality was that I was disappointed in myself, not in the girl.

And I was afraid.

Why was I afraid?

Well, I was afraid because I was putting my heart in danger.

I was afraid because, by choosing women who were obviously not very nice based entirely on their looks, I was putting myself in considerable danger. Not just in terms of disappointment, but in terms of getting into a relationship with a cold, selfish and manipulative woman – and, God forbid, having children with her – which could truly ruin my entire life.

By attempting to repress and ignore my disappointment, I was placing myself in considerable danger of ruining my life – and the lives of my potential children, which is even worse.

“Negative” feelings are designed to protect you, in the same way that physical pain is designed to protect you.

My feelings were telling me that my approach to women was going to put me in grave danger throughout my life. The value that I placed upon a woman’s looks – in complete opposition to the definition of love we have talked about in this book – left me wide open to disastrous exploitation.

As it turns out, that was not the end of the story either…

Emotions and Exploitation

By placing value on women for their looks alone, it is certainly true that I left myself open to the worst kinds of exploitation – but the reality was that I only left myself open to being exploited because I wanted to exploit the pretty women.

I wanted certain types of women because of my own vanity. We all know that looks alone are not indicators of spiritual quality – in fact, quite the opposite appears so often to be true, except for my wife.

I wanted these women to go out with me because having them on my arm would make me “look good.” In other words, I wanted to use them to dominate others, to evoke envy and establish my own superiority.

Can you see why there are considerable secondary gains in repressing these “negative” emotions?

Can you also see how far away from the truth my original “explanations” were? By providing me with instant and comforting “answers,” they could not have been more opposed to the truth than if they had been direct lies, which at least can be seen and examined.

Even Deeper…

Furthermore, my father chose my mother – a thoroughly nasty and corrupt woman – largely for her looks, since she was very attractive.

Thus, I have seen the results of this kind of mutual exploitation up close, and have lived through all the disasters of a nasty, brutish and short marriage.

However, if I were to cast aside my own shallow addiction to physical appearance, what would be the long-term result?

Having lived it now for over 20 years, I can tell you quite definitively.

When we begin to realign our standards of evaluation from inconsequential things such as appearance, status, money and prestige, towards moral standards such as courage, integrity and virtue…

Well, as I said earlier, almost none of your relationships will survive this transition – because, as you will very quickly discover, if you pursue this course, you think you have a relationship with others, but you really only have a relationship with your own illusions.

My particular illusion was that physical beauty – and the envy it produces in others – creates value.

Sadly, this was like putting a Band-Aid over a sprained ankle, which only made that sprain worse over time.

If I say that I need a beautiful woman in order to have real value, then clearly I am saying that without that beautiful woman, I do not have value – or I have negative value.

If I want to wear platform shoes, it is because I feel that I am short.

Buying and wearing platform shoes does not get rid of my belief that I am short, any more than buying and wearing a wig gets rid of my belief that I am bald.

Acting in “opposition” to an underlying belief only reinforces that belief.

Thus I pursued beautiful women because I felt that I lacked value, which arm-candy would somehow alleviate.

However, this pursuit only reinforced my belief that I lacked value – which is why it could never succeed.

As we talked about earlier, using other people to manage your own anxiety is selfish and corrupt.

For me, using the physical attractiveness of women to avoid the anxiety of my own low self-regard was selfish and corrupt.

Now – although this is of course a very painful experience to go through – and is also enormously humbling – is this not a far better approach to building a happy life than pretending to yourself that the girl just somehow “lost your number”?

Even DEEPER!

Ahhh, but it went even deeper than that!

Like just about everyone else on the planet who was not raised by wolves, I was taught that my family had value in and of itself.

I was “taught” that my father, my mother, my brother, my half-sister – my extended relations of every kind – were valuable and deserved my love simply because they were members of my family.

Of course, as a criterion for love, this is in fact as inconsequential as height, hair, or high cheekbones.

We tend to mock and ridicule the old man who dates the busty bimbo, since he is clearly communicating his shallowness, insecurity and silly vanity.

However, we tend to “cherish” and “respect” those who value family members for no reason other than similar DNA.

Beauty is accidental.

Family is also accidental.

When I began to challenge my own vanity and greedy desire to exploit others – both the pretty women and those who would envy me for being with them – I began to understand that virtue was in fact required for love.

This is a strange, terrifying and disorienting realization.

If virtue is required for love, then I cannot reasonably judge the value of my family by any standard other than virtue.

How does that sit with you?

Your family has no value.

Your country has no value.

Your religion has no value.

Your gods, governments, teachers and friends have no value.

Only virtue has value.

Is it becoming clear to you just what an enormous minefield lay underneath my stab of disappointment in that long-ago sauna?

Can you begin to understand exactly why I felt such fear and trepidation about the very idea of not repressing my feelings anymore?

Deep, deep down, of course, I totally understood the road that I was taking my first step upon. I knew where it would lead, and I knew just how few people would be willing to follow me there. I knew exactly what kind of ugly and hellish confrontations awaited me down that road, how many subtle and vicious attacks I would endure, how many sleepless nights would torture me – and to what end?

Who knew?

And all this came to pass. That fateful night in that sauna, when I made the decision to stop repressing my feelings, every fear I had came true.

When I began to view and evaluate my family members, friends, girlfriends, dates and business associates by reasonable moral standards – nothing fancy, just honesty and integrity really – the whole magnificently empty house of cards that was my social world came fluttering and crashing down.

The world is well-armed against virtue.

The world is so corrupt because being good so often totally sucks.

None of this occurred overnight, of course. It was years before I began to really apply these values to those around me – and it was another few years after that that I broke with my mother. Two years later, I broke with my brother – and the year after that, I broke with my father, which was less important, since I had never lived with him.

But it really does all come back to that first, fateful decision, to simply start listening to what we already know to be true.

The Truth Within…

Deep within our bodies, from the moment of our conception, lie all of the amazing biochemical functionality and potentiality of growth, puberty and maturity.

In the same way, within our unconscious minds, lies all the wisdom we could ever consume in a single lifetime.

We do not defend ourselves against our emotions; we do not defend ourselves against the pain of the past; we do not even defend ourselves against the discomfort of the present.

We always and only ever defend ourselves against the actions of the future.

If we have been hurt by a dentist and we fear returning, we do not fear the past, since that pain has come and gone.

We do not fear the pain of the past.

We fear the pain of the future.

Psychological defences do not exist to prevent us from feeling pain in the past; they exist to prevent us from acting with integrity in the future.

Psychological defences do not prevent us from being exploited in the past – since that has already happened. Psychological defences ensure that we shall be exploited in the future – and that we shall exploit others, which is even worse.

An addict does not take his drug in order to feel bliss in the past, but in order to feel bliss in the present – and, as the addiction develops, in order to avoid the agony of withdrawal in the future.

In the same way, we avoid our feelings in the present because we wish to avoid ugly confrontations in the future.

We ignore our “sinking feeling” when our mother calls because we wish to avoid the confrontation that will inevitably occur if we accept our feelings.

I desperately wanted to avoid my feelings of rejection, because once I felt my own feelings of rejection, it turned out that I was going to have to reject others in the future – the corrupt, the false, the evil.

It was not this particular girl’s rejection of me that I was avoiding – but rather, the inevitable rejection of others that would occur in the future, if I began to in fact judge people according to virtuous principles rather than shallow inconsequentialities.

Do you see why we avoid our feelings?

Do you see why thinking that our avoidance has anything to do with the past is so fundamentally counterproductive and erroneous?

Do you see how terrifying our true feelings are for those who exploit us?

Do you see how impossible it would be to exploit us if we truly felt our own emotions?

Do you see why I say that we must be slaves in order to facilitate slavery?

Do you understand why I say that we must first reject ourselves before we can be controlled by others?

We can do nothing about our enslavement in the past. We were children, we were forced to go to school and church, we were surrounded by people that we never chose to have in our lives – our parents, siblings, our extended family, our teachers…

The slavery of the past is unalterable.

The slavery of the future can be changed.

We cannot be free in the past, or from the past.

We can be free in the future.

And our souls are constantly whispering in our ears the combination to the lock that will set us free.

Feel, communicate, understand, act!

Dodging Defences

When we decide to finally start telling those around us the truth of our experience of them, it is a near-certainty that they will oppose us with every fibre of their beings.

This is not because they are evil or because they are corrupt or because we are doing something “wrong.”

This is because they are frightened.

People oppose us when we speak the truth because they like to hide in shadows – because when we bring the light of truth into their dark and fearful worlds, they actually see their own darkness, which is invisible to them when there is no light.

People live in the dark because they pretend that there is no such thing as light.

When the light appears, it reminds them that darkness is a choice, not an absolute.

Flying from Flight…

If it turned out that gravity was an illusion, and that you could fly simply by picturing it, wouldn't you feel rather foolish for all the time you spent walking or waiting for the bus?

And – more importantly – how would you feel about all those who taught you that flying was impossible?

If, for your whole life, you could have experienced the joy and freedom of flight at will, how would you feel about those who had told you that flight was not only impossible, but evil?

What would that do to your image and picture of the world, if with your new understanding you saw the natural and beautiful wings of children being torn out at the roots in the name of virtue and goodness?

Would you begin to understand what type of people really run the world?

Would the wars, famines, religious conflicts, dictatorships, prisons, gulags, genocides, murders, kidnappings and child abuse all begin to make sense?

It is a simple logical correlation that we are in hot pursuit of in these pages.

The world is full of evil, and no one is allowed to speak the truth.

Throughout history, men have striven to rid the world of evil by creating institutions capable of doing evil – religions, governments, and the absolute authority of parents.

They have continued to do this despite the fact that not only do these institutions not rid the world of evil, but the evils in the world continue to increase.

Thus we can only surmise that the alternative to speaking the truth is even worse. The alternative to all the evils described above is even worse.

The alternative is, of course, discovering that we are turned towards evil through our love of goodness. That we are lied to about virtue in order to lead us to vice.

Let me put forward a simple proposition to illustrate what I mean.

Evil and Lying

Pretend that you are a child again. If a vase lies broken, your mother will command you to tell her who broke it. If you evade or lie, you will be morally attacked, because lying is wrong!

However, when her friends are over, if you tell them that sometimes she drinks in the morning, you are attacked for being “rude” and “inappropriate” and “airing our dirty laundry in public.”

This is the simple principle. It has nothing to do with morality:

If you are in possession of information that those in power want you to reveal, it is “immoral” to lie.

If you are in possession of information that those in power don’t want you to reveal, it is “immoral” to tell the truth.

You are led to serve those in power – the foundational root of all institutionalized evils – by your very desire to be good – to not be called “immoral.”

In other words, the devils destroy you with angels. The devils of this world destroy you with the angels of your nature.

The world is evil because we want to be good.

We are enslaved because we want to be free – of vice.

Every evil man in the world knows how desperately we want to be good. That is why Hitler had his soldiers swear an oath of loyalty to him before turning them on the rest of Europe. He knew that they would want to keep their word, and so would not need to be ruled by force.

World War II would have been impossible without this “integrity.”

“Virtue” created a Holocaust; it created Soviet gulags, Chinese starvation, American prisons and African famines.

Whoever owns the definition of virtue owns mankind.

This we all know. This, deep down, does not surprise us at all. It is our desire to be good – according to the terms of evil men – that turns us to the service of evil.

False virtue makes true vice.

The reason that I wanted to talk about all of this before we get into how you can recognize the defences of others is so that you understand the stakes involved in what you are about to do.

Really, it’s not about exposing the lies of your mother.

It’s about saving lives in the future.

Honesty and Proof

If we lie to evade an unjust punishment, we are called “bad.”

If, by telling the truth, we inflict a just punishment, we are called “bad.”

This is the simple evil of the world.

However in this – as in all things I write – there is absolutely no reason to take my word for it in any way at all.

If your mother ever told you not to lie, how do you think she should logically react when you tell her the truth about how you feel?

Because telling the truth is good, right?

Will she praise you for your honesty?

Try it and see.

Typical Defences

When you begin to tell your mother the truth about how you feel, she will instinctively and inevitably begin to deploy a series of psychological defenses designed to disorient and punish you for telling the truth.

Let us have a look at the likely obstacles that will be thrown in your path when you dare to be honest.

If you tell your mother that you are afraid of answering the phone when she calls, she will immediately ask – usually in a wide-eyed, innocent voice – but… why?

The purpose of this maneuver is to have you provide a reason that she can reject – usually initially through the defence of minimization.

If you say: “I do not feel that you listen to me,” then she will immediately say something along the lines of…

Minimization

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	“What do you mean – I’m listening to you now, aren’t I?”	You’re actually the bad listener, because you don’t even notice that I always listen to you!
Mother	“Are you trying to tell me that I have never – not once in your entire life – ever listened to you?”	You’re insane and exaggerating – I am going to create an impossible standard of proof, wherein a single exception to a complaint dismisses the entire complaint. (“Hey, remember that one Sunday when I didn’t beat you?”)
Father	“Yeah, yeah, you had it sooo tough, didn’t you? Why, when I was your age… [Followed by cavalcades of desperate parental childhood stories.]	You’re a pussy.
Mother	“Sweetie! What on earth could have put that thought into your head?”	There is absolutely no evidence for your complaint. We must look for external sources for your insanity.

Self-Pity

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	[Bursts into tears!]	If you ask me to have sympathy for you, I will forcibly extract sympathy from you. If you think this is a two-way street, I will run you over.
Mother	“I’m sorry, I know that happened, I was so distraught, your father was never home, I was overwhelmed, I did the best I could in a difficult situation…”	Only an unbelievably cold and selfish child could fail to dissolve into tears when considering my plight…
Mother	“I’ve done everything for you! I’ve devoted my whole life to my kids – how can you accuse me of these things?”	You owe me an endless debt of allegiance and obedience – it would be utterly evil to refuse to repay it, let alone criticize me!
Father / Mother	“How many times do we have to apologize for this before you’re satisfied?”	You are using criticism as an unjust weapon to hold power over us and make us feel bad. You bastard.

Denial

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	“What nonsense – of course I listen to you!”	Your experience is utterly incorrect. You are attacking me unjustly. You're crushing my illusions! Dear god, whyyyyy?!?!
Mother	“You don’t really mean that, do you? You can’t possibly believe that!” [Tears.]	Your experience is utterly incorrect. You are attacking me unjustly!
Mother	“Nothing like that ever happened. I never did that.”	Your experience is utterly incorrect. You are attacking me unjustly! I'm an eyewitness, too, and my testimony should at least balance yours!
Siblings	“No one else has a problem – only you. What does that tell you about the reality of the situation?”	You are attacking them unjustly. We are claiming to have no problems so that you will start doubting your own experiences and shut the hell up.Because no one else who was there will support your claims, you must have been seeing things.

Counter Attack

Source	Script	Translation
Mother	“You kids were just so difficult. I know I lost my temper, and I’m sorry about that – but you kids just pushed me and pushed me, and never listened.”	You were a bad kid, and forced me act “badly” on occasion. But it was still all your fault.I get so frustrated when people explicitly tell me to punish them and then complain when I do what they ask for.
Mother	“I never did that! Why are you saying this? Why are you making up these stories? Why are you trying to hurt me?”	I am completely insensitive to your real pain, but you’d better be totally sensitive to my imaginary pain!
Siblings	“Yes, bad things happened for sure, those were difficult times for all of us – but it was a long time ago, it’s time for all of us to forgive, forget and move on.”	I feel really anxious when you bring up the past, so I’m going to pretend that you’re irrationally resentful, and that you’re bringing up the past as a weapon in order to control us in the present.
Siblings	“Yeah, you’ve always had a hard time forgiving people. You can nurse a grudge until it grows a beard.”	It is irrational to feel resentment about being badly treated in the past. You are just imagining all the pain that you suffered. Our parents were fine; you are the bad one.
Siblings	“Tell me – who is it in your life that you feel listens to you just the right amount – not too much, and not too little? What? No one does it exactly right? Well then, the only common denominator in all the problems you have with everyone is, well, you!”	The only reason that you could ever feel pain about the past is because you have impossible standards and can’t ever be satisfied. Mom and dad were the victims of your irrational standards.
Father	“How many times do we have to apologize for this before you’re satisfied, you selfish little…?”	I am going to get angry every time you bring this up, because since I have apologized angrily before, you should be satisfied now.

Genial Blankness

Source	Script	Translation
Mother / Father	“I don’t remember anything like that ever happening, but I can understand that it would be frustrating for you. Any time you ever want to talk about it, I’m here for you.” [Followed by blanket denials if you ever bring the subject up again.]	We’re very sorry that you had bad parents in the alternate universe that you inhabited as a child.We understand that you're insane, but we get understandably weary of it.
Mother / Father	“Your memory of that is different from mine. That’s not how it was for me, but everyone is entitled to his opinion.”	Your experience of your childhood is just an opinion, not reality. You are delusional, but we support you, because we are good parents.
Father	“I don’t remember that ever happening. Are you sure you didn’t dream that?”	It’s a shame that you find it so hard to process reality. I am more than happy to sacrifice your sanity for the sake of retaining my own illusions.

Framing

Source	Script	Translation
Siblings	[Rolls eyes.] “Oh that’s just how [your name] is – don’t mind him. He’s always got a bee in his bonnet about something.”	Only an irrationally angry person could ever complain about our parents.Don't mind him. He's always upset and angry about unimportant things.
Mother / Father	“Oh we already know how you feel about this topic – don’t start that again, we got it, you have a problem with the family…”	No matter how much we try to appease you, you always want us to grovel a little bit more, because you are addicted to shaming us.
Father	“What exactly do you want me to do with all your complaints?”	I will do my best to satisfy your insane little requirements, just to keep the peace.I have absolutely no idea what it is you're asking for, so you might want to get to the point.
Mother	“Is there anything I can do differently?” [When you give a list, you are attacked.]	I have always been very happy to accommodate your requirements – unless you actually give me your requirements, at which point I will attack you.

Aggressive Appeals to “Compassion”

Source	Script	Translation
Father	“You should not bring this stuff up with your mother, because she is fragile.”	We should be very gentle with fragile people – unless they are children, in which case we are allowed to attack them at will.
Mother	“Don’t you know how much these topics hurt me? Don’t you have any compassion for my feelings?”	Only my feelings are important in our relationship – your “feelings” only exist to serve my convenience.
Siblings	“Mom did the best she could. She had the best intentions, she just didn’t have the knowledge. Things were different back then – there was no ‘Oprah.’”	You are completely intolerant for criticizing mom – it’s like getting mad at a houseplant for not knowing how to program a computer. The fact that she had irrational standards for us when we were children is completely irrelevant.
Siblings	“Mom and Dad are getting old now. We know they didn’t always do the right thing, but they’re not about to change now, so we have to make the best of things.”	It requires real maturity – which you apparently do not possess – to accept people’s inevitable limitations. We must forgive those who do wrong – especially those who never forgave us for doing wrong!

Aggressive Appeal to “Self-Respect”

Source	Script	Translation
Siblings	“You have to give up your anger about the past, otherwise it just ends up controlling you forever.”	Now that our parents no longer have total control over your environment, I’m going to try to convince you that they have total control over your happiness.Your feelings will overrun you if you continue to feel them. If you're strong, you'll crush them.
Siblings	“We could dwell on all this for the rest of our lives, but what good would it do? You’ve just got to accept things for how they were, and move on from there.”	I am going to reject the pain that you feel, while preaching that it is moral to accept things for what they are.
Siblings	“Someone’s got to be the bigger person in this relationship – clearly it’s not going to be mom, so I guess it’s up to you then, isn’t it?”	The bigger person must always bow down to the smaller person – that’s how we know how big he really is!Mom is a horribly weak person, so she can't treat family members as they hope to be treated. Surely you won't be as weak as she is!

The Conversation

Now, we are ready to put RTR into practice.

When you pick up the phone to call your mother and tell her the truth about your experience of her, an odd but insistent undertow will attempt to pull the conversation away from your real experience and towards endlessly-debatable “conclusions.”

There is only one way to avoid this tendency, and that is to continually talk about how you feel in the moment.

Here is an example:

• Mom, I want to tell you something… [deep breath] I know that this will sound strange, because I’ve never talked about it before, but it’s very important to me. For some time now – certainly months, and probably years – I have felt a kind of sinking sensation in my stomach when I see your name on the call display. I’m not saying that you’re causing this feeling – I am just telling you what happens for me, and what triggers it. It might be my fault entirely, and I may be misinterpreting everything about our relationship, but I wanted to be honest about how I feel.
• Dear! I had no idea, I’m so sorry that this is happening for you – how strange! Why do you think you are feeling this way?
• I don’t know. I do know that I haven’t been enjoying our conversations as much as I would like to – for quite some time – but I’m not sure why that is.
• Well this is terrible! I had no idea you felt this way – why didn’t you tell me something before?
• I didn’t tell you before because I felt frightened to tell you – again, I don’t know why, and I’m not blaming you – I’m just telling you what I felt.
• Afraid to tell me? Good heavens – why on earth would you feel that? [laughter] Am I really such an ogre?
• Again, I don’t know why I feel what I feel – I just wanted to tell you the truth.
• Well! What do you think we should do about this?
• I don’t really know – mostly because I don’t know why I am feeling what I am feeling. [deep breath] I can tell you this, though – I do feel sadness now, when I hear you tell me that you had no idea that I wasn’t enjoying our conversations very much.
• Well it’s true! I had no idea you felt this way!
• And you were enjoying our conversations?
• Of course!
• And you thought that I was enjoying our conversations?
• Yes.
• Why did you think that?
• Well, I thought that it was just pleasant mother-daughter time. You know, where we chitchat about – I guess you could call them inconsequentialities, but – girly stuff. Nothing earthshaking, I know… But I guess I truly thought you were enjoying our chats. [sniff]
• Mom, it sounds like you’re getting sad.
• I am…
• I feel a sudden sense of guilt overcoming me, because you’re feeling sad.
• Oh, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty or anything – am I not allowed to feel sad when my daughter tells me she doesn’t enjoy our relationship?
• I’m not trying to create any rules here – I’m just telling you the truth about my experience.
• Well I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with your – revelation. You hide this from me for years, and pretend to enjoy our interactions, and then you just drop this bombshell on me without any warning!
• Now I feel a certain amount of fear, because it seems to me that you’re getting angry.
• No, I’m not angry, sweetie. I guess I’m just… surprised.
• I can certainly understand that this would be surprising to you – but now I’m feeling a little angry, because it appears to me that all we’re doing is talking about your feelings, and managing your upset.
• Well you’ve certainly made it very clear how you feel!
• Now I’m feeling a little bit more angry, and I think it’s because – though I’m not saying this is right – I’ve felt unhappy about our phone calls for years, but we’re not talking about that – we’re just talking about your reactions to what I feel.
• Oh, so we’re supposed to have this totally honest relationship now, but I’m not allowed to talk about what I feel?
• Now, I’m feeling even more frightened and angry.
• Well perhaps you could have put just a little bit more effort into figuring out what you felt before dumping it all on me!
• Wow – oh wow, now I feel very scared, very sad, and very angry.
• And what do you expect me to do about that? They’re your feelings, after all!
• That’s true, of course – but every time you tell me something, I feel more and more scared, sad and angry.
• Oh, so now you’re saying it’s all my fault!
• No, I didn’t say that – I am telling you that I feel bad after you tell me something – I don’t know for sure that I feel bad because of what you say.

[pause]

• Are you seeing a psychiatrist? Is that where all this psychobabble is coming from?
• Now I feel confused, and disoriented – because it seems to me that you’re just kind of “jumping out” of the conversation, and trying to put it in a kind of context that has nothing to do with how I feel.
• What are you talking about? I honestly don’t understand a word that you’re saying! Are you taking a new course or something? Is there some new Dr. Phil book out that I’m not aware of? It sounds like you’re reading from some kind of script.
• Mom, now I feel confused and disoriented, because I don’t know what any of this has to do with how I feel, and how I have felt for years. [deep breath] Can you tell me how you’re feeling at the moment?
• Oh, you want to know how I’m feeling? Well that’s nice. I am feeling that you just kind of “jumped” me with all this… psychologizing. It feels the way it has always felt with you when you get some new fad, some new idea, and just – spring it on other people without warning, with absolutely no consideration for their feelings!
• Now I am feeling frustrated, because I asked you about your feelings, and all you did was provide negative judgments.
• Well, you asked me how I felt, and so I told you! If you want us to have this fabulous, new, open relationship, I should be allowed to express my feelings too, right?
• It doesn’t seem to me that when you say “I feel that you are inconsiderate,” that you are really expressing a true emotion, but rather just an angry judgment.
• Oh, so now you are telling me what I feel? Is that where all this is going?
• Mom, I am feeling increasingly frustrated and upset as a result of this conversation – I’m not saying that it’s all your fault, or that you’re making me feel anything…
• Oh will you stop saying that! You sound like a robot! Stop trying to treat me like a child!
• I’m not trying to treat you like a child – I’m just telling you how I’m feeling.
• Oh, right – because it’s all about how you feel! How your feelings affect other people – I’m sure that hasn’t entered your mind one little bit!
• Mom, I’m going to stop talking to you right now, because I’m feeling overwhelmingly sad and upset. You might be right in everything that you’re saying, that I’m inconsiderate and condescending and so on, but I can’t evaluate that objectively right now, because I am feeling so upset.

[pause]

• Sweetie! I’m sorry that you feel judged – perhaps I was too hasty. I’m sorry if I’m reacting too strongly or inappropriately in some way. I just thought we had a good relationship, and now I find out that the whole thing has been a lie for heaven knows how long! Can you blame me for being upset? I guess it wouldn’t hurt to be more open about our feelings – I thought I was doing that, but I guess I am wrong again…
• Now I am feeling confused, and also a little bit irritated.
• Well if I am only making you feel bad by opening my mouth, it makes sense for us to stop talking, since I am obviously deviating from your script in some manner.
• OK, mom.

The Principles at Work

Can you see the overall RTR approach in the above conversation?

Intimacy is not something that occurs in the abstract, or in a contained manner, or in some sort of mythological “story time” pseudo-interaction.

Intimacy occurs in real-time, in the moment, when you speak honestly about your true feelings in the presence of another.

In the above conversation, you talked to your mother openly and honestly about your feelings – you recognized that she would be surprised by your “sudden” honesty, and attempted to manage that transition.

You did not attempt to blame your mother, you did not attempt to “frame” the conversation, you did not inflict any conclusions on her – you merely tried to be honest in the moment about how you felt while talking to her.

You did not fall into the temptation of attacking her with a “conclusion,” but stayed vulnerable and open about what was happening for you throughout the conversation.

Just about everyone will feel confused, frustrated, disoriented and aggressive when you continue to provide them with honest feedback about how you feel while interacting with them. In a very real way, they genuinely have no idea what to do with honesty in the moment, as they speak and interact with you.

When you provide people continual feedback about your feelings – especially in relation to their actions – they will most often attempt to project their own increasing frustrations onto you by willfully misunderstanding you, misinterpreting your motives, inventing your supposed “conclusions,” accusing you of hypocrisy (“Oh, I’m not supposed to be honest about my feelings?”), “framing” the discussion, attacking you and so on.

The truth is that it is utter agony for most people to experience a Real-Time Relationship – particularly the first few times. They will do almost anything to avoid the radioactive pain of seeing themselves in the moment through your eyes.

There is nothing that you can do to manage or diminish the pain that other people feel in the presence of honesty – pain that is only increased by your unwillingness to blame them for your feelings.

When you express genuine curiosity about another person, it is agonizing for them because they have most likely never experienced that before in their life. The only time that most people receive “attention” is when somebody wants to hurt, control or manipulate them, or needs something from them. Thus they will inevitably react to your “attention” with fear and hostility – in order to protect their delusions about the virtue of those who raised them, and those around them.

In the above conversation, you will notice that I do not suggest trying to probe your mother’s feelings. You cannot control the degree of honesty that someone else is willing to bring to any interaction. You can certainly ask others how they feel, but if they respond with manipulative or bullying defenses you cannot reasonably call them dishonest – you can only tell them how you feel as a result of their responses.

What you also may not have noticed in the above conversation is that your mother never actually tells you that you are wrong. Your mother certainly implied that you were inconsiderate, hypocritical and so on – but she never told you that you were wrong about what you felt.

This is one of the greatest strengths of the RTR – if you avoid inflicting “conclusions,” no one can reasonably tell you that your feelings are wrong.

This is why the RTR exposes all of the manipulations, bullying and condescension of those around you. When you tell people honestly how you feel – without inflicting story-time conclusions – it arouses all of their defenses. If you continue to stick to the truth about how you feel, you will actually see all of their defenses, parading in quick sequence. This is, of course, both horrifying and revealing.

What Next?

What happens after the above conversation?

Without a doubt, you have tossed a hand grenade into the bunker of your mother’s defenses.

Initially, her defenses will be surprised, and thus will be relatively crude, openly manipulative and obviously upsetting.

After you hang up, however, she will have a chance to sit and brood, and really embellish the mythology that she feels driven to inflict upon you in order to rescue her own self-serving illusions.

Your mother may be the kind of person who just grimly or breezily ignores discomfort, and so may say nothing about the above interaction the next time you talk.

How do you respond to that?

Why, with honesty. “Mom, I feel baffled and hurt, and I think it might be because…”

Alternatively, you may get a call back in half an hour – or a day or two later – after your mother has had the time to prepare a truly wonderful and moving story about what “happened.” Most likely, she will take on a false kind of “responsibility” for what went wrong in your interaction – still, however, you will end up being blamed for upsetting the apple cart.

What do you do?

Why, you listen to your instincts, and speak the truth of course!

When your mother’s name lights up your call display again, you will undoubtedly feel a much stronger sinking sensation than you did before your last conversation.

If you do end up picking up the phone – which is a decision that only you can make – then you continue right where you left off, talking about your feelings in the moment.

“Mom, when I saw your name on my call display just now, I felt even more of a sinking sensation than I did in the past. I know that has something to do with the interaction we just had, but I’m not sure exactly how.”

And then, when your mother goes off on some mythology junket about what happened, you do not argue with her storytelling – any more than you would argue with Tolkien about whether orcs live in Isengard – but simply tell her how you feel about what she is saying.

Then when she starts manipulating you again, you simply continue to tell her how you feel about what she is saying.

The Endgame

Continuing this process will inevitably lead to one of two outcomes.

If, in conversation after conversation, your mother continually refuses to listen to how you feel, and endlessly manipulates you in order to manage her own anxiety – at some point, you will achieve closure.

In other words, you will understand in your very core the simple and tragic fact that there is no point fishing in this lake anymore, because there are no fish left in the lake.

This means that your mother is simply a mythology robot, with no capacity whatsoever to interact with you in an honest and vulnerable manner.

Fundamentally, she does not exist.

Dead Souls

In the Christian mythology, every person possesses a soul, fashioned in the image of God, which cannot be corrupted.

Thus the hope always exists that even the most evil people can achieve salvation, since they possess an immortal sliver of pure virtue within them at all times.

In the real world, nothing could be further from the truth.

The idea that our personalities possess some sort of Platonic “perfect form” that can survive every kind of abuse and corruption is a deadly myth.

If I smoke for 40 years and contract virulent lung cancer, and I am on my deathbed, what would it mean to say that somewhere within my body there still exist “perfectly healthy lungs”?

No, the reality of the situation is that my lungs are irreversibly diseased. No “magical perfect healthy lungs” exist anywhere in my body, or in any sense whatsoever.

In China, when foot-binding was a common practice, the feet of little girls would be gruesomely tortured so that they ended up “curling under” themselves, the toes burrowing into the heels.

When this process was complete, there was no such thing as “perfectly healthy feet” that floated around these women like some sort of odor. Their feet had been irreversibly mutilated and would never recover or regain their original shape.

The armies and police that are supposedly designed to “protect” citizens always end up preying upon them. When a policeman ends up as a concentration camp guard, no “virtuous policeman” clings to his shadow on the ground – he has become evil and cannot recover.

The same is true of our personalities.

There does come a time when, if we continue to act in a corrupt or abusive manner, our defenses overwhelm and extinguish the very personality that they were originally designed to protect.

When this occurs, we no longer have any access to a healthy and happy “true self.” It dies, as surely as our lungs die when we have lung cancer.

When we finally understand this about our mother – or whoever we are interacting with – we feel an enormous, bottomless sorrow. This sadness is called “closure,” which is the feeling that a surgeon experiences when his patient flatlines beyond recovery.

It is the knowledge that salvation is no longer possible – that no real relationship will ever occur, that we will never be seen or empathized with, that the only thing at the other end of the phone is an empty dungeon of dead ghosts.

When this knowledge comes to us, we shudder in primeval horror – and we also involuntarily raise our eyes to the light and bless the fortune that can help us avoid such a living death.

On the Other Hand…

The possibility always exists, however, that through continually and honestly speaking the truth about our own experiences, we will be able to break through the defenses of those around us.

In this case, relationships can be rescued, intimacy can begin and disaster can be averted.

It is highly unlikely – dare I say impossible? – that this can ever be achieved with anyone in your immediate family who has ever been consistently cruel to you.

Your beautiful world awaits – but not forever…

During this process, you will be constantly tempted to withdraw from your new honesty. This desire will not primarily come from you, but rather from those around you who do not wish to see their own disease.

There is nothing that compels you to continue, of course, except the truth.

I strongly suggest that you avoid getting stuck in the “null zone,” where you have begun the process of speaking the truth – thus shattering your empty compliance – but then give up being honest before the process is completed, and you have gained either new possibilities or final closure.

Keep speaking the truth, no matter how hard it gets, because you deserve so much better – and the beautiful new world that awaits you will not wait forever.

Conclusion

In many ways, this is the most ambitious work that I have ever attempted.

Philosophy is so often discussed in the abstract – in terms of metaphysics, epistemology or ethics – that at times it can seem to have as much relevance to real life as quantum physics does to hitting a baseball.

I truly believe that philosophy will liberate the world, if we humbly submit to and act upon the tenets of truth.

Politics will not free us; art will not free us; by God “culture” will not free us; literature will not free us – only a steadfast examination of and commitment to the truth can break our chains.

I have not tried to pretend that freedom can be won without cost. Realizing the true extent of what it will cost us to become free is both disheartening and encouraging.

It is encouraging because if living the truth requires a near-superhuman effort, then we can be more at peace about the world’s lack of freedom.

The higher the bar, the better our chances – because if freedom were easy but had never been achieved, then it would very likely be impossible.

We do not have to be free any more than we have to eat, breathe, or exercise.

Philosophy does not command us to act with integrity, any more than nutrition commands us to eat well.

Philosophy simply reveals the truth to us – and, in combination with psychology, outlines the likely results of living a lie – but it does not command us to be honest.

Philosophy mentors; it does not bully.

Thus you should feel perfectly free to follow or reject the suggestions contained in this book.

You can lie or speak the truth. You can live with integrity, or mislead others at will. You can disbelieve in the existence of your conscience and hope against hope that your dishonest actions are not even recorded by your own soul.

I am telling you, though, that only the mad forget what they have done.

Pretending that you do not speak English does not prevent you from understanding English.

Pretending that you have told the truth does not prevent you from remembering your lies.

Pretending that you deserve love when you have not earned it does not prevent you from hating yourself.

Pretending that you “love” a woman when you merely want to have sex with her will not prevent the problems that will result.

Rejecting the research on the dangers of smoking does not make you immune to lung cancer.

Thus I urge you to really try on the suggestions in this book. It has nothing to do with obedience to me, to philosophy, to ethics – since virtue requires independent thought, which mere obedience can never generate; any more than “painting by numbers” can generate original art.

We should be honest and courageous and honourable and strong, because those actions – and those actions alone – will inevitably result in self-respect, rational pride – and the capacity to truly love, and be loved.

The joy that lies at the heart of virtue has been clouded by pious falsehoods about what is good.

The deep pleasures that arise from living with integrity must be experienced. They can barely be described to those who have yet to feel them. Real virtue brings joy to your immediate personal relationships, to be sure, but it also spreads aloft, lighting the world, like rising sunlight over a darkened plain, far beyond the mere walls of your experience.

When we light our candles, we ignite the sun!

Strike this match.

For yourself, for your future…

And for the world.

Foreword

In many fairy tales, there lives a terrible beast of stupendous power, a dragon or a basilisk, which tyrannizes the surrounding lands. The local villagers tremble before this monster; they sacrifice their animals, pay money and blood in the hopes of appeasing its murderous impulses.

Most people cower under the shadow of this beast, calling their fear “prudence,” but a few – drunk perhaps on courage or foolhardiness – decide to fight. Year after year, decade after decade, wave after wave of hopeful champions try to match their strength, virtue and cunning against this terrible tyrant.

Try – and fail.

The beast is always immortal, so the villagers cannot hope for time to rid them of their despot. The beast is never rational, and has no desire to trade, and so no negotiations are possible.

The desperate villagers’ only hope is for a man to appear who can defeat the beast.

Inevitably, a man steps forward who strikes everyone as utterly incongruous. He is a stable boy, a shoemaker’s son, a baker’s apprentice – or sometimes, just a vagabond.

This book is the story of my personal assault on just such a beast.

This “beast” is the belief that it is impossible to define an objective, rational, secular and scientific ethical system. This “beast” is the illusion that morality must forever be lost in the irrational swamps of gods and governments, enforced for merely pragmatic reasons, but forever lacking logical justification and clear definition. This “beast” is the fantasy that virtue, our greatest joy, our deepest happiness, must be cast aside by secular grown-ups, and left in the dust to be pawed at, paraded and exploited by politicians and priests – and parents. This “beast” is the superstition that, without the tirades of parents, the bullying of gods or the guns of governments, we cannot be both rational and good.

This beast has brought down many great heroes, from Socrates to Plato to Augustine to Hume to Kant to Rand.

The cost to mankind has been enormous.

Since we have remained unable to define a rational system of universal morality, we have been forced to inflict religious horror stories on our children, or give guns, prisons and armies to a small monopoly of soulless controllers who call themselves “the state.”

Since what we call “ethics” remains subjective and merely cultural, we inevitably end up relying on bullying, fear and violence to enforce social rules. Since ethics lack the rational basis of the scientific method, “morality” remains mired in a tribal war of bloody mythologies, each gang fighting tooth and nail for control over people’s allegiance to “virtue.”

We cannot live without morality, but we cannot define morality objectively – thus we remain eternally condemned to empty lives of pompous hypocrisy, cynical dominance or pious slavery.

Intellectually, there are no higher stakes in the world. Our failure to define objective and rational moral rules has cost hundreds of millions of human lives, in the wars of religions and states.

In many ways, the stakes are getting even higher.

The increased information flow of the Internet has raised the suspicions of a new generation that what is called “virtue” is nothing more – or less – than the self-serving fairy tales of their hypocritical elders. The pious lies told by those in authority – and the complicity of those who worship them – are clearer now than ever before.

“Truth” has been exposed as manipulation; “virtue” as control; “loyalty” as slavery, and what is called “morality” has been revealed as a ridiculous puppet show designed to trick weak and fearful people into enslaving themselves.

This realisation has given birth to a new generation of nihilists, just as it did in 19^th century Germany. These extreme relativists reserve their most vitriolic attacks for anyone who claims any form of certainty. This postmodern generation has outgrown the cultural bigotries of their collective histories, but now view all truth as mere prejudicial assertion. Like wide-eyed children who have been scarred into cynical “wisdom,” they view all communication as advertising, all claims as propaganda, and all moral exhortations as hypocritical thievery.

Since we have no agreement on a cohesive, objective and rational framework for evaluating moral propositions, “morality” remains mired in mysticism, and its inevitable corollary of violence. Just as, prior to the Enlightenment, religious sects warred endlessly for control over the blades of the aristocracy, so now do competing moral mythologies war for control over the state, and all its machinery of coercion.

Thus morality remains, relative to modern science, just as medieval “astronomy” did to modern astronomy – a realm of imaginary mythology, enforced through storytelling, threats, compulsion and exploitation – which actively bars any real progress towards the truth.

This “beast” of relativistic ethics looms above us, preying on us, justifying taxation, imprisonment, censorship and wars. It enslaves the young in state schools and Sunday pews; it ensnares the poor in the soft gulags of welfare; it enslaves even the unborn in the bottomless wells of national debts.

As I wrote in my previous book, “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion,” the most fundamental lie at the centre of unproven ethical theories is that such theories are always presented to children as objective and incontrovertible facts, when in truth they are mere cultural bigotries. The reason that scientists do not need a government or a Vatican is that scientists have an objective methodology for resolving disputes: the scientific method. The reason that language does not need a central authority to guide its evolution is that it relies on the “free market” of accumulated individual preferences for style and utility.

The reason that modern morality – and morality throughout history – has always had to rely first on the bullying of children, and then on the threatening of adults, is that it is a manipulative lie masquerading as a virtuous truth.

The truth is that we need morality; the lie is that gods or governments can rationally define or justly enforce it.

My goal in this book is to define a methodology for validating moral theories that is objective, consistent, clear, rational, empirical – and true.

I am fully aware that, at this moment, you will very likely be feeling a rising wave of scepticism. I fully understand that the odds that some guy out there on the Internet – the homeworld of crazies – has somehow solved the philosophical problem of the ages are not particularly high – in fact, they would be so close to zero as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.

Still, not quite zero.

Ground Rules

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In taking on this mammoth task – particularly in such a short book – I have set myself some basic ground rules, which are worth going over here. (Most of these will be discussed in more detail throughout the course of this book.)

1. I fully accept the Humean distinction between “is” and “ought.” Valid moral rules cannot be directly derived from the existence of anything in reality. The fact that human beings in general prefer to live, and must successfully interact with reality in order to do so, cannot be the basis for any valid theory of ethics. Some people clearly do not prefer to live, and steadfastly reject reality, so this definition of ethics remains subjective and conditional.
2. Ethics cannot be objectively defined as “that which is good for man’s survival.” Certain individuals can survive very well by preying on others, so this definition of ethics does not overcome the problem of subjectivism. In biological terms, this would be analogous to describing evolutionary tendencies as “that which is good for life’s survival” – this would make no sense. Human society is an ecosystem of competing interests, just as the rainforest is, and what is “good” for one man so often comes at the expense of another.
3. I do not believe in any “higher realm” of Ideal Forms. Morality cannot be conceived of as existing in any “other universe,” either material or immaterial. If morality exists in some “other realm,” it cannot then be subjected to a rigorous rational or empirical analysis – and, as Plato himself noted in “The Republic,” society would thus require an elite cadre of Philosopher-Kings to communicate – or, more accurately, enforce – the incomprehensible edicts of this “other realm” upon everyone else. This also does not solve the problem of subjectivism, since that which is inaccessible to reason and evidence is by definition subjective.
4. I do not believe that morality can be defined or determined with reference to “arguments from effect,” or the predicted consequences of ethical propositions. Utilitarianism, or “the greatest good for the greatest number,” does not solve the problem of subjectivism, since the odds of any central planner knowing what is objectively good for everyone else are about the same as any central economic planner knowing how to efficiently allocate resources in the absence of price – effectively zero. Also, that which is considered “the greatest good for the greatest number” changes according to culture, knowledge, time and circumstances, which also fails to overcome the problem of subjectivism. We do not judge the value of scientific experiments according to some Platonic higher realm, or some utilitarian optimisation – they are judged in accordance with the scientific method. I will take the same approach in this book.
5. I also refuse to define ethics as a “positive law doctrine.” Although it is generally accepted that legal systems are founded upon systems of ethics, no one could argue that every law within every legal system is a perfect reflection of an ideal morality. Laws cannot directly mirror any objective theory of ethics, since laws are in a continual state of flux, constantly being overturned, abandoned and invented – and legal systems the world over are often in direct opposition to one another, even at the theoretical level. Sharia law is often directly opposed to Anglo-Saxon common-law, and the modern democratic “mob rule” process often seems more akin to a Mafia shootout than a sober implementation of ethical ideals.
6. I am fully open to the proposition that there is no such thing as ethics at all, and that all systems of “morality” are mere instruments of control, as Nietzsche argued so insistently. In this book, I start from the assumption that there is no such thing as ethics, and build a framework from there.
7. I do have great respect for the ethical instincts of mankind. The near-universal social prohibitions on murder, rape, assault and theft are facts that any rational ethicist discards at his peril. Aristotle argued that any ethical theory that can be used to prove that rape is moral must have something wrong with it, to say the least. Thus, after I have developed a framework for validating ethical theories, I run these generally accepted moral premises through that framework, to see whether or not they hold true.
8. I respect your intelligence enough to refrain from defining words like “reality,” “reason,” “integrity” and so on. We have enough work to do without having to reinvent the wheel.
9. Finally, I believe that any theory – especially one as fundamental as a theory of ethics – does little good if it merely confirms what everybody already knows instinctively. I have not spent years of my life working on a theory of ethics in order to run around proving that “murder is wrong.” In my view, the best theories are those which verify the truths that we all intuitively understand – and then use those principles to reveal new truths that may be completely counterintuitive.

Having spent the last few years of my life preparing, training, and then combating this beast, I hope that I have acquitted myself with some measure of honour. I believe that I have emerged victorious – though not entirely unscathed – and I look forward to seeing who shares this view. (Of course, if I have failed, I have at least failed spectacularly, which itself can be both edifying and entertaining!)

I studied the history of philosophy in graduate school, and hold a Masters degree, but I do not have a PhD in philosophy. I am far from a publicly recognized intellectual. While I may not be the most unlikely champion, I am also far from the most likely.

Whether I have succeeded or not is not up to you, and it is not up to me.

If the reasoning holds, the greatest beast is down.

A Modest Suggestion…

It is the height of audacity to suggest to readers how to read a book, but given the challenges of the task before us, I would like to make one small suggestion before we embark.

If we lived in the 15^th century, and I were trying to convince you that the world were round, I would put forward reams of mathematical and physical proofs. If you held a contrary opinion, you would naturally react with scepticism, and be inclined to quibble with every line of proof.

However, if you and I could in fact sail around the world, and arrive back where we started without retracing our steps, you would be far more willing to accept the conceptual proofs for what you had already experienced to be true. You might find fault with a particular logical step or metaphor, but you would already agree with the conclusion, and thus would be more prone to help correct the details rather than reject the theory as a whole.

If my task were to respond to every possible objection to every linguistic, logical and empirical step, this book would remain forever unfinished – and unread. Perfectionism is, in essence, procrastination, and I consider the task of this book to be too important – and the dangers of false morality too grave and imminent – to spend so long trying to achieve heaven that we all end up in hell.

Thus I humbly suggest that you wait to see how effective the ethical framework I propose is at proving the most commonly accepted moral maxims of mankind before passing final judgment on the theory.

I truly believe that the definition of a rational ethical framework is the most essential task that faces mankind. I truly appreciate your interest in this crucial matter – and would like as always to thank the wonderfully kind donators who have made this work possible.

I ride into battle well armed by others.

Introduction

For countless generations, mankind lived in a kind of egocentric womb of self-imposed ignorance: the world was flat, the sun, moon and stars revolved around him, ancestors beckoned to him from beyond the mists of death, and thunder was the anger of the gods.

Burrowing out from this narcissistic womb of subjective interpretation required the labour of millennia – and cost the lives of millions. The effort required to wrench our perspective from perceptual experience to conceptual logic was terrifying, exhilarating, highly disorienting and extremely dangerous. Understanding that the world was not what it felt like, or seemed like, was – and remains – the greatest feat of our intelligence. The truth of reality turned out to be in the eyes of the mind, not of the flesh.

The world looks flat; it is not. The sun and the moon look the same size; they are not. The stars seem to move around the earth; they do not.

Learning the truth requires that we see the world from outside our senses – this does not mean a rejection of our senses, but an airtight compliance with the real evidence of the senses, which is not that the world is flat, but that matter, energy and physical laws are consistent. When we let go of a rock in our hand, it falls – this is the real evidence of the senses, not that the Earth is fixed and immovable. The idea that the world is immobile is an incorrect assumption that contradicts the direct evidence of our senses, which is that everything falls. If everything falls, the world cannot be fixed and immovable.

These are the little truths of the everyday; that rocks fall, smoke rises, fire is hot and the sun and the moon are both round. If we remain steadfastly and rigorously committed to these “little truths,” we can in time derive the great truths of physics, which provide us such awesome knowledge and power.

In between the little truths and the great truths, however, are the illusions that blind us – both in physics and in ethics.

In physics, the great truths cannot contradict the little truths. No “unified field theory” can validly contradict our direct sense-experience of a falling rock or a rising flame. The greatest mathematical theory cannot be valid if applying it returns incorrect change at the checkout counter.

Historically, however, in between our own little truths and the great truths lies what I will call the “null zone.”

The “Null Zone”

We tell our children not to punch each other, and we believe that violence is wrong in the abstract, as a general moral rule. The “little truth” is: don’t punch. The “great truth” is: violence is wrong.

However, there exists in our minds an imaginary entity called “God,” and this entity is considered perfectly moral. Unfortunately, this entity continually and grossly violates the edict that “violence is wrong” by drowning the world, consigning souls to hell despite a perfect foreknowledge of their “decisions,” sanctioning rape, murder, theft, assault and other actions that we would condemn as utterly evil in any individual.

Thus we have the little truth (don’t punch) and the great truth (violence is wrong) but in the middle, we have this “null zone” where the complete opposite of both our little truths and our great truths is considered perfectly true.

Historically, we can see the same inconsistency in physics. There are no perfect circles in our direct experience, but because of a belief in God, all planetary motion had to be a “perfect circle” – a premise that retarded astronomy for centuries. Similarly, if a man turns his head, he does not reasonably believe that the entire world rotates around him – and he would happily put this forward as not just his own “little truth,” but as a great truth, or universal principle. Yet for most of human history, it was believed that the stars and planets rotated around the Earth, rather than that the Earth rotated. Here again we can see the “null zone” between direct sense experience and universal principle, wherein entirely opposite principles are considered to be perfectly valid.

No sane man experiences God directly. In his daily life, he fully accepts that that which cannot be perceived does not exist. No reasonable man flinches every time he takes a step, fearing an invisible wall that might be barring his way. The greatest abstractions of science support his approach.

Conversely, in the “null zone” of religion, the exact opposite of both the little truths and the great truths is believed to be true. Personally, a man believes that that which cannot be perceived does not exist – intellectually, science has proven this repeatedly. However, in the “null zone” of theology, the exact opposite proposition holds true – the axiom there is that that which cannot be perceived must exist.

Our belief in the virtue of the military also lies in this “null zone.” If a private man is paid to murder another man, we call him a “gun for hire,” and condemn him as a hit man. If, however, this man puts on a green costume with certain ribbons and commits the same act, we hail him as a hero and reward him with a pension. The little truth (I should not murder) is perfectly consistent with the great truth (murder is wrong) – yet in the middle there lies a “null zone,” where murder magically becomes “virtuous.”

If this “null zone” is valid, then no logical proposition can ever hold. If a proposition is true – and the exact opposite of that proposition is also true – then logical reasoning becomes impossible. The growth of rational science has been the steady attack upon this “null zone,” and the incursion of objective consistency into these mad little pockets of subjective whim.

In old maps, before cartographers had finished their explorations, the drawings of known lands would fade into blank paper. The growth of knowledge requires first a delineation of what is not known, and then an expansion of known principles into the unknown areas.

The same is true in the realm of morality.

The Casualties

Crossing this “null zone” is fraught with peril. The road from the little truths to the great truths is paved with the bones of millions. From the death of Socrates to the torture of early scientists by religious zealots, to the millions who have murdered and died for the black fantasies of fascism and communism, any forward-thrust of human knowledge into the “null zone” is fraught with considerable danger.

Must “crossing the null zone” – or seamlessly uniting the little truths with the great truths – inevitably be so difficult and dangerous? It is an enormous challenge to unite the perceptual with the conceptual in a straight line of logical reasoning – but must this progress take thousands of years and oceans of blood?

If we look at the technological and economic progress of mankind, we see more or less a flat line for countless millennia, followed by massive and asymptotic spikes over the past few hundred years. It is inconceivable that some widespread genetic mutation could account for this sudden and enormous acceleration of intellectual consistency and material success. Theories claiming that a certain “snowball effect” came into existence, mysteriously propelled by an accumulation of all the little increments of knowledge that had occurred since the dawn of civilization, can usually be dismissed out of hand as entirely ex post facto explanations, since they have no predictive value.

If we understand that our staggering potential has been available to us for at least tens of thousands of years – and that there is both great profit and great pleasure in exercising it – then it at once becomes clear that we really do want to use our amazing minds.

Thus there must be a downward force that has historically acted to crush and enslave the natural liberty of mankind.

In the realm of science, it is not too hard to see the oppressive forces that continually kept our minds in near-primeval ignorance. The combination of superstition in the form of religion, and violence in the form of the aristocracy, threatened rational thinkers with intimidation, imprisonment, torture, and murder. Just as a farmer profits from the low intelligence of his cows, and a slave-owner profits from the fear of his slaves, priests and kings retained their privileges by threatening with death anyone who dared to think.

The simple truth is that “priests” and “kings” were – and are – merely men. The simple truth is that the gods and devils that were supposed to justify their rule never existed.

We have made great strides in understanding the nature and reality of simple human equality, but the sad fact of the matter is that the realm of morality is still lost in the “null zone” – in the destructive illusions of the “middle truths.”

“Middle Truths”

Let us call the oppositional principles that reside in the “null zone” – between sense perception and conceptual consistency – the “middle truths.”

These “middle truths” are the most dangerous illusions of all, because they grant the appearance of truth while actually attacking the truth.

By providing the illusion that we have found the truth, “middle truths” actually prevent us from gaining the truth. They are the last line of defense for fantasy, predation and exploitation.

Since they are not only irrational, but anti-rational, “middle truths” remain endlessly flexible – as long as they serve those in power. For instance, Christianity arose out of the growing fascism of the late Roman Empire partly by lashing out at the “primitive” superstitions of existing theologies. “Forget your old gods, we have a brand new God who is far better!”

“Middle truths” always take the form of a truth, followed by a lie. “Zeus is a pagan superstition” is a true statement, which was openly made by Christian proselytizers. The lie that followed was: “Yahweh is not a pagan superstition, but a real and living God.”

We can personalize this a little bit more with an example that will be familiar to anyone who has ever counselled a dysfunctional friend. “My last boyfriend was a real jerk,” she will say, and you will fervently agree. “My new boyfriend is really great though,” she will add, and you will try not to roll your eyes.

It is very hard not to replace one illusion with another.

“The British government is a tyranny!” cried the American revolutionaries in the 18^th century – and, after evicting the British troops, they then set up their own government and started attacking their own citizens.

“Aristocracy is an unjust abomination!” cried other revolutionaries, who then set up the tyranny of the majority in the form of democracy.

“Middle truths” can also exist in science, and similarly prevent the natural progress from the little truths to the great truths. Until the 18^th century, for instance, biologists believed in “spontaneous generation,” or the idea that life can spring from nonliving matter. This had never been observed, of course, but conformed to ancient writings both philosophical and religious, and so was accepted as fact. Also, prior to the Einsteinian revolution in 1905, light was believed to move through a fixed and invisible substance called “luminiferous ether,” just as sound waves move through air. No scientist who believed in this theory had any empirical evidence for this “ether,” either personally or scientifically – but it was considered necessary to conform to other observable characteristics.

Religion is also another “middle truth” – one of the most dangerous ones. It is true that we are a unique species in the universe, as far as we know. A giraffe is a taller quadruped, but man is not just a “smarter” primate, but something quite different. The nature of that difference remains largely unknown – the religious explanation of “we are not the same as animals because we have a soul and were created by a God” is just another example of a “middle truth.” It is true that we are very different from animals. It is not true that we were created by a god and have a soul.

Just as some parasites cannot take root until they dislodge the prior parasites, “middle truths” only attack previous illusions so that they can take their place. Those who are sceptical of the prior fantasies are drawn towards the new fantasy. Thus does Christianity displace paganism, Marxism displace Christianity, postmodernism displace Marxism, democracy displace aristocracy, and so on.

Until the great truths are achieved, and united with the little truths, “middle truths” are just a rotating phalanx of exploitive and destructive falsehoods – specifically designed to prevent the achievement of the great truths.

And the great truths are always achieved from the little truths.

The world falls because a rock falls.

“Middle Truths” and Exploitation

Biologically, parasitism is a wholly viable survival strategy for many creatures. In the absence of ethical norms, stealing energy and resources from other creatures is perfectly sensible. In general, the most sustainable and stable form of parasitism is symbiosis, or mutually beneficial coexistence. Thus the bacteria that inhabit our intestines aid their own survival by helping us digest our food.

However, a virus that renders us continually exhausted, and barely able to keep ourselves alive, can scarcely be called “mutually beneficial.”

If we think of our long and grim history of disaster, starvation, war, disease and poverty – and compare it with the astounding material successes of modernity – it is clear that a form of parasitism tyrannized our minds and capacities for millennia. Now that the last few hundred years have shown the power and creativity of the human spirit, we can view our species as an organism that has shaken off a terrible parasite, and sprung from an endless gasping deathbed to perform the most astounding feats of gymnastics.

When we cure ourselves of a disease, we feel better, but the disease does not. From the perspective of the smallpox virus, the smallpox vaccine is genocidal.

In the same way, the parasites that strangle mankind view the liberty of the majority with horror. Since their parasitism frees them from the demands of reality – to earn their daily bread – they inevitably view the freedom of the masses as a form of enslavement for themselves. Thus would a farmer view the “liberation” of his livestock as an utter disaster…

Establishing truth necessarily limits fantasy. Limiting fantasy necessarily limits exploitation. If I can convince you that I am a living man-God, and that the God who birthed me wants you to give me 10% of your income, or you will be punished for eternity, then I can become exceedingly rich. I am a parasite of illusions, and depend on those illusions for my sustenance as surely as fungus relies on warmth, dampness – and darkness.

Those who use moral fantasies to exploit mankind have always fought tooth and nail against those who threaten their livelihood by discovering and disseminating the truth.

We are familiar with the example of the Mafia, which threatens potential rivals with maiming and death, or the spectacle of religious sects attacking each other, or one government attacking another.

When philosophers expose the falsehoods necessary for continued exploitation, however, they are ideally not aiming to set themselves up as competitors. They do not wish to replace the Mafia, or the church – they wish to eliminate it completely.

A more modern analogy would be the relationship between the state, lobbyists and taxpayers. Lobbyists will ferociously attack other lobbyists who compete for the same tax dollars. However, imagine how all lobbyists would band together to attack anyone who proposed eliminating the state as an institution.

Parasites will aggressively compete with one another for the host’s limited resources – but it is in their best interest to band together to attack anything that threatens to eliminate the host itself.

In this way, in any society where the state and the church are nominally separated, each entity tends to compete for adherents. Where the church begins to lose ground, the state will aggressively recruit patriots – resulting in secular socialism. Where the state begins to lose ground, the church will aggressively recruit adherents – resulting in religious fundamentalism, often with tinges of libertarianism.

However, the philosophers who oppose all intellectual error are the sworn enemies of all the parasites that feed off illusions. The “great truths” of physics eliminate the need for supernatural agents, and render miracles impossible. The explanatory power of science wholly outshines the religious fictions that masquerade as knowledge about the physical world.

The scientific method requires that every thesis be supported by evidence and rationality. Since there is no evidence for gods – and the very idea of gods is innately self-contradictory – the thesis “gods exist” cannot stand. Inevitably, the religious parasites attempt to defend their thesis by trying to split reality into “two realms” – the scientific and the spiritual. However, there is no evidence for the existence of this “spiritual” realm in the present, any more than there was for the parallel universe of Platonic “Forms” 2,500 years ago.

Thus the establishment of consistent and universal truth necessarily limits and destroys the exploitive potential of illusion. In particular, the “great truths,” which are universal and consistent, make redundant and ridiculous the “middle truths” – which are in fact exploitive fantasies. We are familiar with the “middle truth” of religion; a few others will be examined and revealed here, some of which may shock you.

Effective Parasitism

The most effective parasites – or viruses – are those which fool the body into indifference. Our immune systems are designed to attack foreign substances within the body, isolating and killing them. We fear HIV and cancer in particular because they are able to bypass our immune systems.

The same technique is used by intellectual parasites to disable the defense systems of those they prey upon.

If a stranger attacks you in an alley and demands your money, you will be horrified and appalled. You may fight back, you may run, or you may give him your wallet, but you would remain shocked, angry and frightened by the interaction. When you repeated the story, you would tell it in a way that reinforced the base and vile violation of your personal and property rights. Others would feel sympathy for your predicament, and would avoid said alley in the future.

This is an example of a “little truth,” which is: “Stealing from me is wrong.”

However, when a government agent sends you a letter demanding that you pay him money, you may feel a certain indignity, but you would not relate the story with the same horror and indignation to your friends.

This is an example of a “middle truth,” which obscures a “great truth,” which is that “stealing is wrong.”

This book will focus on exposing and destroying these false “middle truths.” I believe that mankind suffers endlessly under the tyranny of false ethical “middle truths” which justify the destructive worldviews of religious superstition, secular despotism and the cult of the family.

My thesis in this book is that in ethics, as in every other intellectual discipline, the great truths arise directly from the little truths. The disorienting fog of the “middle truths” is a hellish path to navigate, but it is worth struggling through, because the only fundamental alternative to truth is exploitation, destruction – and, inevitably, the untimely demise of millions.

Part 1: Theory

A Framework for Ethics

Ethical propositions are different from other types of knowledge statements. If I say, “I like jazz,” that may be a true or false statement, but it is not generally considered binding upon you in any way. My preference for jazz is a mere statement of personal fondness; based on my statement, it is not incumbent upon you to either like or dislike jazz.

Similarly, if I say “I like vegetables,” that is also a mere statement of personal preference. However, if I say, “vegetables are healthy food,” then I have shifted from a statement of personal preference to a statement of objective fact. It is the difference between “I like ice cream,” and, “Ice cream contains milk.”

The fundamental difference between statements of preference and statements of fact is that statements of fact are objective, testable – and binding. If you value truth, it is incumbent upon you to accept the fact that ice cream contains milk, once it is proven. (If you do not value truth, you would never be in this debate – or any other debate – in the first place!)

If I say that the earth is round, and I provide ample proof for this statement, it is no longer up to you to determine on your own whim whether the statement is true. If I can prove that the earth is round, then you are bound to accept it as true, unless you are willing to reject reason and evidence as the criteria for truth.

If I accept the validity of mathematical laws, I cannot arbitrarily reject a mathematical proof that conforms to those laws. If I do reject such a proof, I can no longer claim to accept the validity of mathematical laws. My acceptance of these laws means that I am bound to accept as valid those proofs that conform to these laws. The rejection of a proof that conforms to rational standards is a rejection of rational standards as a whole.

The scientific method, rationality itself, and mathematical laws are all examples of objective criteria for establishing the truth of a proposition. It is not my opinion that two and two make four – if you also accept that two and two make four, you are not subjecting yourself to my mere opinion, but to a rational truth.

Objective Truth

A central challenge in understanding the nature of truth is the realization that “truth” does not exist in the world in the same way that a rock or tree does.

The concept “truth” is necessarily a relative term – though that does not mean a subjective or arbitrary term. The concept “health” is also a relative term – we compare “health” to sickness, and also to relative standards of health. What is considered “good health” for a 90-year-old would scarcely be considered good health for a 20-year-old. The definition of a long life is very different now than it was 500 years ago.

This does not mean, however, that the concept of “health” is entirely relative and subjective. A 10-year-old dying of leukemia is unhealthy by any definition – just as a 20-year-old marathon runner is healthy by any definition. Currently, a man who lives to 90 has statistically had a long life, though that would change if medical technology suddenly allowed us to live to be 200.

As our definition of “health” expands, it does not invalidate earlier definitions, but rather extends them. If medical technology advances to allow 90-year-olds to win marathons, then our definition of what is healthy for the aged will change – but that does not mean that the 20-year-old marathon runner suddenly becomes unhealthy. Learning algebra does not invalidate arithmetic.

Truth also has value relative to necessity as well. Newtonian physics has been supplanted by Einsteinian physics, which has proven far more accurate in extreme situations such as extraordinarily high gravity or speed. However, sailors wishing to calculate the correct path across an ocean find Newtonian physics more than accurate enough. You wouldn’t want to send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri using Newtonian physics, but it is totally fine for getting a ship from Lisbon to New York. The labour involved in learning and implementing Einsteinian physics is thus a net negative for a sailor.

As a result, the sentence “Newtonian physics is less accurate than Einsteinian physics, but Newtonian physics is the best way to calculate a ship’s path” can be considered a valid proposition. Newtonian physics is thus both less accurate, and more appropriate.

If we wanted to drink the purest possible water, we would likely pay thousands of dollars per bottle. Unless we were enormously rich and highly frivolous, we would never pay that much to quench our thirst. It is true that pure water is better for us, but the price that purity requires hits a threshold of diminishing returns. Thus “purer is better” gives way to “purer is worse.”

Again, this does not mean that the purity of water is utterly subjective. Distilled water is always more potable than seawater.

Truth and Objective Reality

The concept of truth necessarily involves the concept of accuracy. If I am trying to shoot an arrow at a bull’s-eye, the accuracy of my shot is determined by how far my arrow lands from the centre.

What, then, is the “bull’s-eye” of truth?

Well, the truth of a statement is measurable relative to its conformity with objective reality.

Putting aside the challenges of language for the moment, if I point to a seagull and say, “That is an anvil,” I am clearly mistaken, because anvils are inorganic, and cannot fly. The truth value of my statement is measured relative to the objective facts of reality. Since the seagull is not in fact an anvil, my statement is untrue.

Naturally, this equation between truth and reality requires that language and our senses be considered relatively objective. There are many good reasons to believe that both language and sense evidence are in fact objective; we could get into a complicated discussion about this, but it should suffice to say that since you are using your eyes to read a book written in a human language, we can at least agree that your eyes, and the language we share, are at least objective enough for you to accurately process what I am writing. If they are not, we have nothing to talk about, and you haven’t understood anything I’ve written anyway, so this sentence will be equally meaningless, and might as well have been rendered in “Wingdings”:

Assuming you can tell the difference between the above two fonts, we can reasonably continue.

Accuracy and Consistency

It is impossible for me to accurately paint a cloud, since in the time it takes to paint it, the cloud continually changes. I can accurately paint a photograph of a cloud, which has become frozen in time.

If I spend an hour trying to paint a cloud, and then I ask you whether or not my painting is an accurate representation of that cloud, you must necessarily reply that it is not.

In other words, where there is no consistency, there can be no accuracy.

When we dream at night, our perceptions are that the rules of “matter” and “energy” are in a constant state of flux – we are immune to gravity, and then we fly on the back of an elephant, and then we can walk through walls. It is no more possible to develop a “scientific physics of dreams” than it is to accurately paint a cloud.

Logic, science and truth, then, are impossible in the absence of consistency.

Fundamentally, the laws of logic are derived from the behaviour of matter and energy, at least at the perceptual level. If I tell you to throw a ball both up and down at the same time, I am asking for the impossible, which you can easily test by attempting to fulfill my request. If I tell you to plough both the north field and the south field simultaneously, you will be unable to comply. If I demand that you turn a rose into a donkey, my demand will never be met.

Perceptual reality is consistent and objective – and it is from this consistency and objectivity that we derive the laws of logic. Our statements about reality can only accurately represent reality as a direct result of this consistency and objectivity.

The fact that seagulls do not arbitrarily turn into anvils – or vice versa – is the root of our capacity to accurately judge the statement: “That is a seagull.” If seagulls spontaneously and continually changed their nature, we would be unable to make either true or false statements regarding them – or anything for that matter.

This is the root of a key criterion of the scientific method – reproducibility. If I make a universal claim about the nature of gravity, then you should be able to reproduce that claim in your own environment. If reality were not consistent, then reproducibility would be an irrational criterion for the establishment of truth.

If you were a math teacher, you would be very unlikely to accept a wrong answer from a student, even if that student claimed that his answer was “right” when he wrote it down, but just somehow changed in the interim.

Thus we can accept that we must measure the validity of a statement relative to objective reality – both empirically, and logically. Logic as a discipline arises only as a result of the consistency of reality; empirical observations are also valid or invalid only as a result of the consistent nature of reality.

The Existence of “Truth”

Truth, then, can be measured according to two central criteria:

1. Truth is a measure of the correlation between the ideas in our minds and the consistency of rationality, which is directly derived from the consistent behaviour of matter and energy in the real world. (Rational consistency, or internal logic.)
2. Truth is also a measure of the correlation between the ideas in our minds and the nature and behaviour of matter and energy in the real world. (Empirical evidence, or empiricism.)

The first criterion is a measure of the consistency of ideas with themselves – and such consistency is a requirement because reality is consistent with itself. If I say, “I do not exist,” that is an example of an idea that is inconsistent with itself, since I must exist in order to utter the sentence. The second criterion is a measure of the accuracy of ideas relative to empirical observations of objective reality.

Empiricism versus Rationality

Empiricism can be thought of as the ability to instinctively catch a thrown ball, or measure its movement; rationality is the ability to predict and understand the path that ball will take based on universal principles. Clearly, if balls randomly went in any and every direction – and magically transformed into flocks of doves to boot – we would be utterly unable to predict their behaviour.

Thus, since matter obeys immutable laws, our theories about matter must also obey immutable laws. If I know nothing about baseball, but watch a baseball game where the players always obey the rules, it would be irrational for me to formulate a theory about the rules of baseball that directly contradicted the behaviour of the players I was watching. Since the actions of the players are consistent, any theory I develop regarding the rules that guide those actions must also be consistent.

This requirement for consistency is one of the most basic requirements for truth. Since reality is consistent, theories regarding reality must also be consistent.

In fact, the first hurdle that any theory must overcome is that of internal consistency.

Internal Consistency

If I am an architect, and submit a plan to build a house, the first hurdle that I must overcome is whether or not my house can be built at all. If I submit wonderful plans for a house constructed entirely of soap bubbles, I will never get the commission, since such a “house” could never stand.

Similarly, if an engineer submits a plan for a bridge, the first criterion that must be satisfied is whether or not the bridge will stand. Other considerations such as longevity, aesthetics and so on will only apply if the bridge is physically viable to begin with.

It would be illogical – not to mention highly unproductive – to build a bridge out of random materials, using random “calculations,” in order to find out whether or not it will stand. Since physical laws are consistent and universal, it is relatively easy to figure out whether or not a bridge will stand before building it.

There are two ways to determine the viability of the bridge before building it. The first is to look for internal inconsistencies within the premises and calculations that claim to support the viability of the bridge. If there are significant errors in the calculations justifying the weight that the bridge can support, then the bridge will likely be either over-designed, or under-designed. If erroneous mathematical calculations result in a strength of minus50 tons per square foot at any part of the bridge, then it certainly will not stand – or, if it does, its viability will be only accidental, and not reproducible.

The mathematical calculations supporting the viability of the bridge must thus be internally consistent before any other considerations can be taken into account.

In computer terms, code that does not compile cannot be tested.

This is true in the scientific world as well. Theories are always checked for internal consistency before they are submitted to empirical tests.

The reason that internal consistency is so essential is that since theories claim to have value relative to reality, and reality is internally consistent, any theory that is not internally consistent cannot have value relative to reality.

Only after the internal consistency of the calculations has been established can the degree to which the bridge meets the specifications be reviewed. It is possible to write internally consistent specifications for a tiny bridge built entirely out of balsa wood, but unless the engineer is writing an article for a model railroading magazine, his specifications, though consistent, will fail to meet any industrial requirement.

Once we have determined that the bridge will stand, we can then determine whether or not it meets our specific needs, such as supporting the weight of pedestrians versus trains.

In the realm of economics, the same criterion applies. If my economic theory requires that prices go up and down simultaneously, then it cannot be valid, since this is impossible. Once my theory has been checked for internal consistency, I can begin to look for evidence, and/or begin using my theory to make proactive predictions.

Thus, we can see that any theory, to be valid, requires the following:

1. Internal consistency (logic).
2. External consistency (testability).

With this in mind, we can now turn to the core subject of this book.

Ethics

Since ethics is a subject that we all have opinions about already, it is important to outline the relationship between instinctual ethics and rational ethics.

A baseball player can catch a fly ball even if he knows nothing about physics. Similarly, we can correctly perceive an action as immoral even if we know nothing about ethical theories.

If I can catch a fly ball, then I have an instinctual feel for the behaviour of a baseball in flight. My instinctual understanding, however, does not give me the capacity to accurately launch a spaceship to orbit Jupiter. I have an immediate “little truth” – how the ball will move – but that does not give me a universal “great truth” – how matter behaves.

In the same way, our common moral revulsion towards actions such as rape and murder are not necessarily inaccurate, but they do not give us the capacity to create or validate consistent and empirical moral theories.

If I propose a scientific theory that completely invalidates a baseball player’s ability to catch a fly ball, then I have the insurmountable challenge of explaining how the baseball player actually does catch the ball. Also, if my grand theory cannot accurately predict the arc of a fly ball, then I have a “great truth” which directly contradicts a “little truth,” which cannot be valid. Since the necessity of logical consistency directly arises from the “little truths” of perceptual experience, any theory that directly contradicts such experience cannot be valid.

In other words, the senses give rise to logic – therefore logic cannot contradict the evidence of the senses. Evidence always trumps explanation.

In a similar manner, any valid ethical theory should be able to explain and justify our common revulsion towards crimes such as murder and rape. It cannot reasonably contradict the universal prohibitions of mankind, but must accurately incorporate and explain them.

However, just as Einsteinian physics provided surprising truths – in fact, it would have been of little value if those truths were not surprising – ethical theories provide the most value when they also reveal surprising truths – shocking, even. In fact, ethical theories that did not provide surprising truths would be a mere confirmation of existing instinctual preferences, and thus be of little value.

The Discipline of Theoretical Ethics

If I say that something is “morally good” – in other words, if I propose an ethical theory – then clearly I am arguing that human beings should act in a particular manner, or avoid acting in a particular manner.

If I tell my son that he should become a baseball player just because I want him to, I am not stating a universal moral premise, but rather a personal preference. He is not moral if he becomes a baseball player, and neither is he immoral if he does not.

However, if I tell him that it is moral for sons to obey their fathers, and immoral for them to disobey their fathers, then I am proposing a preference that is universal, rather than merely personal – I am trying to turn a “little truth” (I want you to become a baseball player) into a “great truth” (It is immoral for sons to disobey fathers). If he wishes to be moral, he must become a baseball player – not because becoming a baseball player is moral, but rather because obeying his father is moral.

When I speak of a universal preference, I am really defining what is objectively required, or necessary, assuming a particular goal. If I want to live, I do not have to like jazz, but I must eat. “Eating” remains a preference – I do not have to eat, in the same way that I have to obey gravity – but “eating” is a universal, objective, and binding requirement for staying alive, since it relies on biological facts that cannot be wished away.

Ethics as a discipline can be defined as any theory regarding preferable human behaviour that is universal, objective, consistent – and binding.

Naturally, preferential behaviour can only be binding if the goal is desired. If I say that it is preferable for human beings to exercise and eat well, I am not saying that human beings must not sit on the couch and eat potato chips. What I am saying is that if you want to be healthy, you should exercise and eat well.

As Hume famously pointed out, it is impossible to derive an “ought” from an “is.” What he meant by that was that preference in no way can be axiomatically derived from existence. It is true that a man who never exercises and eats poorly will be unhealthy. Does that mean that he “ought” to exercise and eat well? No. The “ought” is conditional upon the preference. If he wants to be healthy, he ought to exercise and eat well. It is true that if a man does not eat, he will die – we cannot logically derive from that fact a binding principle that he ought to eat. If he wants to live, then he must eat. However, his choice to live or not remains his own.

Similarly, there is no such thing as a universally “better” direction – it all depends upon the preferred destination. If I want to drive to New York from San Francisco, I “ought” to drive east. If I want to drive into the ocean from San Francisco, I “ought” to drive west. Neither “east” nor “west” can be considered universally “better.”

It is true that very few people do drive into the ocean, but that does not mean that it is universally true that nobody ought to drive into the ocean. Principles are not democratic – or, if they are, we once more face the problem of rank subjectivism, and must throw the entire concept of ethics out the window.

“Behaviour” exists in objective reality, outside our minds – the concepts “ought,” “should,” and “preference,” do not exist outside our minds.

However, the fact that “ought” does not exist within objective reality does not mean that “ought” is completely subjective. Neither the scientific method nor numbers themselves exist within reality either, yet science and mathematics remain objective disciplines.

Self-Defeating Arguments

In order to begin our discussion of ethics, it is essential that we understand the nature of self-defeating arguments.

In economics, a theory cannot be valid if it requires that prices go up and down at the same time. In physics, a theory cannot be valid if it requires that gases expand and contract simultaneously. In mathematics, a theory cannot be valid if it requires that 2+2=5, since “5” is just another way of describing 2+3, not 2+2, and so to say that 2+2=5 is to say that 5=4, which is self-contradictory.

In general, any theory that contradicts itself in the utterance cannot be valid. It does not require external disproof, since it disproves itself. We do not need to examine every nook and cranny in the universe to determine that a “square circle” does not exist. The very concept is self-contradictory, and thus disproves itself in the utterance.

If I submit a complex mathematical proof to you, and you notice that, at the very beginning, I state that my proof relies on the fact that two plus two make both four and five at the same time, you do not need to read any further to know that my proof is invalid.

Similarly, as mentioned before, if I come up to you and say: “I do not exist,” my thesis automatically self-destructs. If I can communicate to you that I do not exist, then clearly I exist.

If I come up to you and say: “There is no such thing as truth,” then I am making a statement that I consider to be true claiming that truth does not exist. Again, my argument self-destructs.

If I tell you that “Language is meaningless,” then I have also contradicted myself. In order for me to verbally communicate that language is meaningless, language must have at least some meaning.

If I tell you that “Your senses are invalid,” then my argument also self-destructs, since I am using your sense of hearing to communicate to you that your sense of hearing is invalid. If I can successfully communicate my thesis to you, then your sense of hearing must be valid. Thus I must assume that your senses are valid in order to convince you that your senses are not valid, which cannot stand.

Preferences

Now that we understand the nature of self-defeating arguments, we can turn to the question of preferences.

Preferences are central to any methodology claiming to define the truth-value of propositions. The scientific method, for instance, is largely defined by innate preferences for logical consistency and empirical verification. For science, the premise is: if you want to determine a valid truth about the behaviour of matter and energy, it is preferable to use the scientific method.

In this sense, “preferable” does not mean “sort of better,” but rather “required.” If you want to live, it is universally preferable that you refrain from eating a handful of arsenic. If you wish to determine valid truths about reality, it is universally preferable that your theories be both internally consistent and empirically verifiable. “Universally preferable,” then, translates to “objectively required,” but we will retain the word “preferable” to differentiate between optional human absolutes and non-optional physical absolutes such as gravity.

Similarly, if ethical theories can be at all valid, then they must at least be both internally and externally consistent. In other words, an ethical theory that contradicts itself cannot be valid – and an ethical theory that contradicts empirical evidence and near-universal preferences also cannot be valid.

Thus in ethics, just as in science, mathematics, engineering and all other disciplines that compare theories to reality, valid theories must be both logically consistent and empirically verifiable.

Preferences and Existence

If I say “I like ice cream,” only one word remains ambiguous in that sentence. Clearly “I” exist, since I am expressing a personal preference. Equally clearly, “ice cream” also exists in reality. However, the word “like” is more problematic.

Preferences do not exist objectively within reality. If you were obsessively curious, you could perhaps follow me around and record every time I ate ice cream, which would probably provide a good empirical basis for establishing my preference for it. The possibility could exist, however, that I am in fact a masochist, and dislike ice cream intensely, and prefer to torture myself with its unpleasant taste – and then confuse you by claiming to like it.

We can find evidence for preferences; we cannot find preference itself in reality. Preference exists as a relationship between consciousness and matter, just as gravity exists as a relationship between bodies of mass.

Putting aside the challenging questions of free will versus determinism, it is reasonable to assume that whatever a person is doing in the present is what he or she “prefers” to do. If I get up and go to work, then obviously I prefer to do that, as opposed to all other alternatives. Even if I hate my job, I clearly hate it less than, say, being penniless.

Given that human beings can perform a near infinite variety of actions, whatever a person is doing in the moment is chosen out of all other possible options. I am choosing to write this book rather than, say, learning how to tango.

When we apply this simple fact to ethical arguments, we come up with some very interesting results.

Preferences and Arguments

Remembering our above analysis of self-defeating arguments, we can easily understand the contradictory nature of the statement: “preferences do not exist.” Given that every human action – including making philosophical statements – is chosen in preference to every other possible action, arguing that preferences do not exist requires a preference for arguing that preferences do not exist, which is a self-contradictory statement.

Arguing that preferences do not exist is exactly the same as arguing that language does not exist. It is an utterly self-defeating argument.

Since it is impossible to act without expressing a preference – either implicitly or explicitly – anyone who acts accepts the premise that preferences exist. Thus it is impossible to debate the existence of preferences without accepting the existence of preferences.

Preferences and Universality

The next question thus becomes: are preferences purely subjective, or can they be universal?

Clearly, some preferences are subjective. Musical tastes, personal hobbies, favourite literature and so on are all subjective and personal preferences.

The challenge arises when we try to define some preferences as objective.

The proposition before us is thus: can some preferences be objective, i.e. universal?

When I say that some preferences may be objective, I do not mean that all people follow these preferences at all times. If I were to argue that breathing is an objective preference, I could be easily countered by the example of those who commit suicide by hanging themselves. If I were to argue that eating is an objective preference, my argument could be countered with examples of hunger strikes and anorexia.

Thus when I talk about universal preferences, I am talking about what people should prefer, not what they always do prefer. To use a scientific analogy, to truly understand the universe, people should use the scientific method – this does not mean that they always do so, since clearly billions of people consult ancient fairy tales rather than modern science for “answers.” There is no way to achieve truth about the universe without science, but people are perfectly free to redefine “truth” as “error,” and content themselves with mystical nonsense.

Likewise, if a man wants to cure an infection, he should take antibiotics rather than perform an Aztec rain dance. The preference for taking antibiotics rather than doing a rain dance is universal, since dancing cannot cure infections. Thus, although there is the occasional madman who will try to cure himself through dancing, it is still universally preferable that if a man wants to cure himself, he must take antibiotics.

In other words, if you want to get to the top of a mountain, wishing for it will never work. If you want to know the origins of the universe, prayer will never provide an answer. People still wish, and pray, but that does not make wishing or praying any more effective.

With that in mind, let us turn to the question of whether or not universal preferences can be valid.

Arguments and Universality

If I choose to debate, I have implicitly accepted a wide variety of premises that are worth spending some time to unpack here.

Premise 1: We Both Exist

If I choose to debate with you, then I necessarily must accept that we both exist. If believe that I exist, but you do not, then debating makes no sense, and would be the action of a madman. If I were to start arguing with my reflection in a mirror, I should be sedated, not debated.

Premise 2: The Senses have the Capacity for Accuracy

Since human beings cannot communicate psychically, all debates necessarily involve the evidence of the senses. Writing presupposes sight; talking requires hearing; Braille requires touch. Thus any proposition that depends upon the invalidity of the senses automatically self-destructs.

Premise 3: Language has the Capacity for Meaning

Similar to Premise 2, since all arguments require language, any proposition that rests on the premise that language is meaningless is immediately disproven. Using language to argue that language has no meaning is like using a courier to send a message arguing that couriers never deliver messages.

Premise 4: Correction Requires Universal Preferences

If you correct me on an error that I have made, you are implicitly accepting the fact that it would be better for me to correct my error. Your preference for me to correct my error is not subjective, but objective, and universal.

You don’t say to me: “You should change your opinion to mine because I would prefer it,” but rather: “You should correct your opinion because it is objectively incorrect.” My error does not arise from merely disagreeing with you, but as a result of my deviance from an objective standard of truth. Your argument that I should correct my false opinion rests on the objective value of truth – i.e. that truth is universally preferable to error, and that truth is universally objective.

Premise 5: An Objective Methodology Exists For Separating Truth From Falsehood

If you disagree with me, but I tell you that you must agree with me because I am always right, it is unlikely that you would be satisfied by the rigor of my argument. If you provided good reasons as to why I was wrong, but I just kept repeating that I was right because I am always right, our interaction could scarcely be categorized as a debate.

The moment that I provide some sort of objective criterion for determining truth from falsehood, I am accepting that truth is more than a matter of opinion.

This does not necessarily mean that my objective criteria are logical – I could refer you to a religious text, for example. However, even if I do so, I am still accepting that the truth is something that is arrived at independent of mere personal assertion – that an objective methodology exists for separating truth from falsehood.

Premise 6: Truth Is Better Than Falsehood

If I tell you that the world is flat, and you reply that the world is not flat, but round, then you are implicitly accepting the axiom that truth and falsehood both exist objectively, and that truth is better than falsehood.

If I tell you that I like chocolate ice cream, and you tell me that you like vanilla, it is impossible to “prove” that vanilla is objectively better than chocolate. The moment that you correct me with reference to objective facts, you are accepting that objective facts exist, and that objective truth is universally preferable to subjective error.

Premise 7: Peaceful Debating is the Best Way to Resolve Disputes

If I tell you that the world is flat, and you pull out a gun and shoot me, this would scarcely be an example of a productive debate. True, our disagreement would have been “resolved” – but because only one of us was left standing at the end.

If you told me in advance that you would deal with any disagreement by shooting me, I would be unlikely to engage in a debate with you.

Thus it is clear that any debate relies on the implicit premise that evidence, reason, truth and objectivity are the universally preferable methods of resolving disputes between individuals. It would be completely illogical to argue that differences of opinion should be resolved through the use of violence – the only consistent argument for the value of violence is the use of violence. (It will be useful to keep this particular premise in mind, since it will be very important later on.)

In essence, then, debating requires an objective methodology, through meaningful language, in the pursuit of universal truth, which is objectively preferable to personal error.

This preference for universal truth is not a preference of degree, but of kind. A shortcut that reduces your driving time by half is twice as good as a longer route – but both are infinitely preferable to driving in the completely wrong direction.

In the same way, the truth is not just “better” than error – it is infinitely preferable, or required.

Premise 8: Individuals are Responsible for their Actions

If I argue that human beings are not responsible for their actions, I am caught in a paradox, which is the question of whether or not I am responsible for my argument, and also whether or not you are responsible for your response.

If my argument that human beings are not responsible for their actions is true, then I am not responsible for my argument, and you are not responsible for your reply. However, if I believe that you are not responsible for your reply, it would make precious little sense to advance an argument – it would be exactly the same as arguing with a television set. (The question of responsibility is, of course, closely related to the question of free will versus determinism, which will be the subject of another book.)

Thus, fundamentally, if I tell you that you are not responsible for your actions, I am telling you that it is universally preferable for you to believe that preference is impossible, since if you have no control over your actions, you cannot choose a preferred state, i.e. truth over falsehood. Thus this argument, like the above arguments, self-destructs.

Universally Preferable Behaviour

As a result of the above arguments, we can see that it is impossible to enter into any debate without accepting the premise that certain behaviours are universally preferable.

I use the word “behaviour” here rather than “thought” because it is important to differentiate between purely internal and unverifiable states such as “thinking” from objective and verifiable states such as “acting,” “writing” and “speaking.”

It is impossible to prove that I dreamt of an elephant last night. It is possible to prove that I have written the word “elephant,” which is why I use the word “behaviour” rather than “thought.”

Acquiescing to superior logic in an argument is an action. If, every time I conceded a point to you, I said nothing, but rather just stared at you blankly, you would find it rather irritating to debate me. To concede a point, I must perform the action of verbal acquiescence.

Thus it can be seen that, inherent in the very act of arguing are a number of embedded premises that cannot be conceivably overturned.

If I ask you to meet me on the tennis court, and show up with a hunting rifle, we may end up playing a sport of sorts, but it certainly will not be tennis. When I ask you to meet me on the tennis court for a game, implicit in that request is an acceptance of the rules of tennis.

Historically, those engaged in ethical debating have often failed to maintain this basic reality.

I cannot submit a scientific paper written in my own personal language, claiming that it has been refereed by my psychic goldfish, and expect to be taken seriously. Similarly, I cannot start a philosophical debate on ethics with reference to my own personal values, and claim that my arguments have all been validated by Trixie the omniscient and invisible leprechaun, and expect to be taken seriously.

The very act of debating requires an acceptance of universally preferable behaviour (UPB). There is no way to rationally respond to an ethical argument without exhibiting UPB.

Let us now turn to a series of positive proofs for UPB.

UPB and Validity

One of the central challenges faced by modern philosophers is the need to prove that moral rules are both possible and universal. Until moral rules can be subjected to the same rigour and logic as any other propositions, we will forever be stymied by subjectivism, political prejudices and the pragmatic “argument from effect.”

The closest historical analogy to our present situation occurred in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, during the rise of the scientific method. The early pioneers who advocated a rational and empirical approach to knowledge faced the same prejudices that we face today – all the same irrationalities, entrenched powers of church and state, mystical and subjective “absolutes” and early educational barriers. Those who advocated the primacy of rationality and empirical observation over Biblical fundamentalism and secular tyrannies faced the determined opposition of those wielding both cross and sword. Many were tortured to death for their intellectual honesty – we face far less risk, and so should be far more courageous in advocating what is true over what is believed.

In order to attack false moralities, we must start from the beginning, just as the first scientists did. Francis Bacon did not argue that the scientific method was more “efficient” than prayer, Bible texts or starvation-induced visions. He simply said that if we want to understand nature, we must observe nature and theorize logically – and that there is no other route to knowledge.

We must take the same approach in defining and communicating morality. We must begin using the power and legitimacy of the scientific method to prove the validity and universality of moral laws. We must start from the beginning, build logically and reject any irrational or non-empirical substitutes for the truth.

What does this look like in practice? All we have to do is establish the following axioms:

• Morality is a valid concept.
• Moral rules must be consistent for all mankind.
• The validity of a moral theory is judged by its consistency.

To start from the very beginning… are moral rules – or universally preferable human behaviours – valid at all?

There are only two possibilities when it comes to moral rules, just as there are in any logical science. Either universal moral rules are valid, or they are not. (In physics, the question is: either universal physical rules are valid, or they are not.)

A rule can be valid if it exists empirically, like gravity, or because it is true, like the equation 2+2=4.

We must then first ask: do moral rules exist at all?

Certainly not in material reality, which does not contain or obey a single moral rule. Moral rules are different from the rules of physics, just as the scientific method is different from gravity. Matter innately obeys gravity or the second law of thermodynamics, but “thou shalt not murder” is nowhere inscribed in the nature of things. Physical laws describe the behaviour of matter, but do not contain a single prescription. Science says that matter does behave in a certain manner – never that it should behave in a certain manner. A theory of gravity proves that if you push a man off a cliff, he will fall. It will not tell you whether you should push him or not.

Thus it cannot be said that moral rules exist in material reality, and neither are they automatically obeyed like the laws of physics – which does not mean that moral laws are false, subjective or irrelevant. The scientific method itself does not exist in reality either – and is also optional – but it is not at all false, subjective or irrelevant.

If we can prove that moral theories can be objective, rational and verifiable, this will provide the same benefits to ethics that subjecting physical theories to the scientific method did.

Before the rise of the scientific method, people believed that matter obeyed the subjective whims of gods and devils – and people believe the same of morality now. Volcanoes erupted because the mountain-god was angry; good harvests resulted from human or animal sacrifices. No one believed that absolute physical laws could limit the will of the gods – and so science could never develop. Those who historically profited from defining physical reality as subjective – mostly priests and aristocrats – fought the subjugation of physical theories to the scientific method, just as those who currently profit from defining morality as subjective – mostly priests and politicians – currently fight the subjugation of moral theories to objective and universal principles.

As mentioned above, the scientific method is essentially a methodology for separating accurate from inaccurate theories by subjecting them to two central tests: logical consistency and empirical observation – and by always subjugating logical consistency to empirical observation. If I propose a perfectly consistent and logical theory that says that a rock will float up when thrown off a cliff, any empirical test proves my theory incorrect, since observation always trumps hypothesis.

A further aspect of the scientific method is the belief that, since matter is composed of combinations of atoms with common, stable and predictable properties, the behaviour of matter must also be common, stable and predictable. Thus experiments must be reproducible in different locations and times. I cannot say that my “rock floating” theory is correct for just one particular rock, or on the day I first tested it, or at a single location. My theories must describe the behaviour of matter, which is universal, common, stable and predictable.

Finally, there is a generally accepted rule – sometimes called Occam’s Razor – which states that, of any two theories that have the same predictive power, the simpler of the two is preferable. Prior to the Copernican revolution, when Earth was considered the centre of the universe, the retrograde motion of Mars when Earth passed it in orbit around the sun caused enormous problems to the Ptolemaic system of astronomical calculations. “Circles within circles” multiplied enormously, which were all cleared away by simply placing the sun at the centre of the solar system and accepting the elliptical nature of planetary orbits.

Thus any valid scientific theory must be (a) universal, (b) logical, (c) empirically verifiable, (d) reproducible and (e) as simple as possible.

The methodology for judging and proving a moral theory is exactly the same as the methodology for judging and proving any other theory.

Moral Rules: A Definition

The first question regarding moral rules is: what are they?

Simply put, morals are a set of rules claiming to accurately and consistently identify universally preferable human behaviours, just as physics is a set of rules claiming to accurately and consistently identify the universal behaviour of matter.

The second question to be asked is: is there any such thing as “universally preferable behaviour” at all? If there is, we can begin to explore what such behaviour might be. If not, then our examination must stop here – just as the examination of Ptolemaic astronomy ceased after it became commonly accepted that the Sun was in fact the centre of the solar system.

UPB: Five Supports

As we discussed above, the proposition that there is no such thing as preferable behaviour contains an insurmountable number of logical and empirical problems. “Universally preferable behaviour” must be a valid concept, for five main reasons.

The first is logical: if I argue against the proposition that universally preferable behaviour is valid, I have already shown my preference for truth over falsehood – as well as a preference for correcting those who speak falsely. Saying that there is no such thing as universally preferable behaviour is like shouting in someone’s ear that sound does not exist – it is innately self-contradictory. In other words, if there is no such thing as universally preferable behaviour, then one should oppose anyone who claims that there is such a thing as universally preferable behaviour. However, if one “should” do something, then one has just created universally preferable behaviour. Thus universally preferable behaviour – or moral rules – must be valid.

Syllogistically, this is:

1. The proposition is: the concept “universally preferable behaviour” must be valid.
2. Arguing against the validity of universally preferable behaviour demonstrates universally preferable behaviour.
3. Therefore no argument against the validity of universally preferable behaviour can be valid.

We all know that there are subjective preferences, such as liking ice cream or jazz, which are not considered binding upon other people. On the other hand, there are other preferences, such as rape and murder, which clearly are inflicted on others. There are also preferences for logic, truth and evidence, which are also binding upon others (although they are not usually violently inflicted) insofar as we all accept that an illogical proposition must be false or invalid.

Those preferences which can be considered binding upon others can be termed “universal preferences,” or “moral rules.”

How else can we know that the concept of “moral rules” is valid?

We can examine the question biologically as well as syllogistically.

For instance, all matter is subject to physical rules – and everything that lives is in addition subject to certain requirements, and thus, if it is alive, must have followed universally preferred behaviours. Life, for instance, requires fuel and oxygen. Any living mind, of course, is an organic part of the physical world, and so is subject to physical laws and must have followed universally preferred behaviours – to argue otherwise would require proof that consciousness is not composed of matter, and is not organic – an impossibility, since it has mass, energy, and life. Arguing that consciousness is subject to neither physical rules nor universally preferred behaviours would be like arguing that human beings are immune to gravity, and can flourish without eating.

Thus it is impossible that anyone can logically argue against universally preferable behaviour, since if he is alive to argue, he must have followed universally preferred behaviours such as breathing, eating and drinking.

Syllogistically, this is:

1. All organisms require universally preferred behaviour to live.
2. Man is a living organism.
3. Therefore all living men are alive due to the practice of universally preferred behaviour.
4. Therefore any argument against universally preferable behaviour requires an acceptance and practice of universally preferred behaviour.
5. Therefore no argument against the existence of universally preferable behaviour can be valid.

Since the scientific method requires empirical corroboration, we must also look to reality to confirm our hypothesis – and here the validity of universally preferable behaviour is fully supported.

Every sane human being believes in moral rules of some kind. There is some disagreement about what constitutes moral rules, but everyone is certain that moral rules are valid – just as many scientists disagree, but all scientists accept the validity of the scientific method itself. One can argue that the Earth is round and not flat – which is analogous to changing the definition of morality – but one cannot argue that the Earth does not exist at all – which is like arguing that there is no such thing as universally preferable behaviour.

Or:

1. For a scientific theory to be valid, it must be supported by empirical observation.
2. If the concept of “universally preferable behaviour” is valid, then mankind should believe in universally preferable behaviour.
3. All men believe in universally preferable behaviour.
4. Therefore empirical evidence exists to support the validity of universally preferable behaviour – and the existence of such evidence opposes the proposition that universally preferable behaviour is not valid.

The fourth argument for the validity of universally preferable behaviour is also empirical. Since human beings have an almost-infinite number of choices to make in life, to say that there are no principles of universally preferable behaviour would be to say that all choices are equal (i.e. subjective). However, all choices are not equal, either logically or through empirical observation.

For instance, if food is available, almost all human beings prefer to eat every day. When cold, almost all human beings seek warmth. Almost all parents choose to feed, shelter and educate their children. There are many examples of common choices among humankind, which indicate that universally preferable behaviour abounds and is part of human nature.

As mentioned above, no valid theory of physics can repudiate the simple fact that children can catch fly-balls – in the same way, no valid theory of ethics can reject the endless evidence for the acceptance of UPB.

Or:

1. Choices are almost infinite.
2. Most human beings make very similar choices.
3. Therefore not all choices can be equal.
4. Therefore universally preferable choices must be valid.

The fifth argument for the validity of universally preferable behaviour is evolutionary.

Since all organic life requires preferential behaviour to survive, we can assume that those organisms which make the most successful choices are the ones most often selected for survival.

Since man is the most successful species, and man’s most distinctive organ is his mind, it must be man’s mind that has aided him the most in making successful choices. The mind itself, then, has been selected as successful by its very ability to make successful choices. Since the human mind only exists as a result of choosing universally preferable behaviour, universally preferable behaviour must be a valid concept.

Or:

1. Organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behaviour.
2. Man is the most successful organism.
3. Therefore man must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
4. Man’s mind is his most distinctive organ.
5. Therefore man’s mind must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
6. Therefore universally preferable behaviour must be valid.

We could bring many more arguments to support the existence and validity of UPB, but we shall rest our case with the above, and move to an examination of the nature of UPB.

UPB: Optional and Objective

Since we have proven the validity of universally preferable behaviour, the question of morality now shifts. Since morality is valid, what theories can quantify, classify, explain and predict it?

First of all, we must remember that morality is clearly optional. Every man is subject to gravity and requires food to live, but no man has to act morally. If I rape, steal or kill, no thunderbolt strikes me down. Moral rules, like the scientific method or biological classifications, are merely ways of rationally organizing facts and principles relative to objective reality.

The fact that compliance with moral rules is optional, however, has confused many thinkers into believing that morality itself is subjective.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Living organisms are part of material reality, and material reality is rational and objective. Applying moral theories is optional, but that does not mean that all moral theories are subjective. The scientific method is also optional, but it is not subjective. Applying biological classifications is optional, but biology is not subjective. Choices are optional; consequences are not. I can choose not to eat, but I cannot choose to live without eating. I can choose to behead someone, but I cannot choose whether or not they can live without a head. Morality is thus optional, but the effects of moral choices are measurable and objective.

Now, since morality is a valid concept, the next question is: to what degree or extent is morality valid?

As mentioned above, the first test of any scientific theory is universality. Just as a theory of physics must apply to all matter, a moral theory that claims to describe the preferable actions of mankind must apply to all mankind. No moral theory can be valid if it argues that a certain action is right in Syria, but wrong in San Francisco. It cannot say that Person A must do X, but Person B must never do X. It cannot say that what was wrong yesterday is right today – or vice versa. If it does, it is false and must be refined or discarded.

To be valid, any moral theory must also pass the criterion of logical consistency. Since the behaviour of matter is logical, consistent and predictable, all theories involving matter – either organic or inorganic – must also be logical, consistent and predictable. The theory of relativity cannot argue that the speed of light is both constant and not constant at the same time, or that it is 186,000 miles per second, five fathoms in depth and also green in colour.

However, since moral theories apply to mankind, and mankind is organic, the degree of empirical consistency required for moral theories is less than that required for inorganic theories. All rocks, for instance, must fall down, but not all horses have to be born with only one head. Biology includes three forms of “randomness,” which are environment, genetic mutation and free will. For example, poodles are generally friendly, but if beaten for years, will likely become aggressive. Horses are defined as having only one head, but occasionally, a two-headed mutant is born. Similarly, human beings generally prefer eating to starving – except anorexics. These exceptions do not bring down the entire science of biology. Thus, since moral theories describe mankind, they cannot be subjected to exactly the same requirements for consistency as theories describing inorganic matter.

The final test that any moral theory must pass is the criterion of empirical observation. For instance, a moral theory must explain the universal prevalence of moral beliefs among mankind, as well as the divergent results of human moral “experiments” such as fascism, communism, socialism or capitalism. It must also explain some basic facts about human society, such as the fact that state power always increases, or that propaganda tends to increase as state power increases. If it fails to explain the past, understand the present and predict the future, then it must be rejected as invalid.

UPB: The Practice

How does all this look in practice? Let’s look at how the requirement for universality affects moral theories. We shall touch here on proofs and disproofs for specific moral propositions, which we shall examine in more detail in Part 2.

If I say that gravity affects matter, it must affect all matter. If even one pebble proves immune to gravity, my theory is in trouble. If I propose a moral theory that argues that people should not murder, it must be applicable to all people. If certain people (such as soldiers) are exempt from that rule, then I have to either prove that soldiers are not people, or accept that my moral theory is false. There is no other possibility. On the other hand, if I propose a moral theory that argues that all people should murder, then I have saved certain soldiers, but condemned to evil all those not currently murdering someone (including those being murdered!) – which is surely incorrect.

If, to save the virtue of soldiers, I alter my theory to argue that it is moral for people to murder if someone else tells them to (a political leader, say), then I must deal with the problem of universality. If Politician A can order a soldier to murder an Iraqi, then the Iraqi must also be able to order the soldier to murder Politician A, and the soldier can also order Politician A to murder the Iraqi. The application of this theory results in a general and amoral paralysis, and thus is proven invalid.

I also cannot logically argue that is wrong for some people to murder, but right for other people to murder. Since all human beings share common physical properties and requirements, proposing one rule for one person and the opposite rule for another is invalid – it is like proposing a physics theory that says that some rocks fall down, while others fall up. Not only is it illogical, it contradicts an observable fact of reality, which is that human beings as a species share common characteristics, and so cannot be subjected to opposing rules. Biologists have no problems classifying certain organisms as “human” because they share common and easily identifiable characteristics – it is only moralists who seem to find this level of consistency impossible.

Furthermore, if my moral theory “proves” that the same man should not murder one day, but should murder the next day (say, when he steps out into the Iraqi desert), then my position is even more ludicrous. That would be equivalent to arguing that one day a rock falls downward, and the next day it falls upward! To call this any kind of consistent theory is to make madness sanity.

Since valid theories require logical consistency, a moral theory cannot be valid if it is both true and false at the same time. A moral theory that approves of stealing, for instance, faces an insurmountable logical problem. No moral theory should, if it is universally applied, directly eliminate behaviour it defines as moral while simultaneously creating behaviour it defines as immoral. If everyone should steal, then no one will steal – which means that the moral theory can never be practiced. And why will no one steal? Well, because a man will only steal if he can keep the property he is stealing. He’s not going to bother stealing a wallet if someone else is going to immediately steal that wallet from him.

Any moral theory proposing that “stealing is good” is also automatically invalid because it posits that property rights are both valid and invalid at the same time, and so fails the test of logical consistency. If I steal from you, I am saying that your property rights are invalid. However, I want to keep what I am stealing – and therefore I am saying that my property rights are valid. However, property rights cannot be both valid and invalid at the same time, and so this proposition itself must be invalid.

Similarly, any moral theory that advocates rape faces a similar contradiction. Rape can never be moral, since any principle that approves it automatically contradicts itself. If rape is justified on the principle that “taking pleasure is always good,” then such a principle immediately fails the test of logical consistency, since the rapist may be “taking pleasure,” but his victim certainly is not. (The same goes, of course, for murder and assault. We will be returning to these proofs – as well as a further examination of property rights – in more detail in Part 2 of this book.)

Thus subjecting moral theories to the scientific method produces results that conform to rationality, empirical observations and plain common sense. Murder, theft, arson, rape and assault are all proven immoral. (Universal and positive moral rules can also be proven – i.e. the universal validity of property rights and non-violence – but we shall discuss that in Part 2.)

To aid in swallowing this rather large conceptual pill, below is a table that helps equate theories of physics and biology with scientific theories of universally preferable (or moral) behaviour:

	Physics	Biology	Morality
Subject	Matter	Organic Matter	Preferable behaviour for mankind
Instance	A rock	A horse	A man
Sample Rule	Gravity	The desire for survival	Self-ownership
Sample Theory	Entropy	Evolution	Property rights
Sample Classification	Matter/Energy	Reptile/Mammal	Good/Evil
Example	Matter cannot be created or destroyed, merely converted to energy and back.	If it is alive and warm-blooded, it is a mammal.	Stealing is wrong.
Hypothesis	Atoms share common structures and properties, and so behave in predictable and consistent manners.	Organic matter has rules – or requirements – that are common across classifications.	Universally preferable behaviour shares common rules and requirements.
Proof	Logical consistency, empirical verification.	Logical consistency, empirical verification.	Logical consistency, empirical verification.
Negative Proof Example	If mass does not attract mass, theories relying on gravity are incorrect	If organisms do not naturally self-select for survival, the theory of evolution is incorrect.	If communism succeeds relative to its stated goals, theories based on the universal validity of property rights are incorrect.

In conclusion, it is safe to say that (a) moral rules are valid, and (b) moral theories must be subjected to the rigours of logic and evidence, just as theories of physics and biology are. Any moral theory based on non-universal or self-contradictory principles is demonstrably false.

UPB: The Framework

UPB can thus be seen as a framework for validating ethical theories or propositions – just as the scientific method is a framework that is used to validate scientific theories or propositions.

An example of a moral proposition is: “the initiation of the use of force is wrong.” UPB is the methodology that tests that proposition against both internal consistency and empirical observation. UPB thus first asks: is the proposition logical and consistent? UPB then asks: what evidence exists for the truth of the proposition?

To keep this book at a reasonable length, we will in general deal mostly with the first criterion of logical consistency. For the second criterion, we shall rely for evidence on the universal prohibitions across all cultures against certain actions such as rape, theft, assault and murder. Much more could be written on the historical evidence that helps support or reject various moral propositions, but we shall leave that for another time. If we establish the validity of UPB, we have achieved an enormous amount. If we do not, evidence will scarcely help us.

Let us now turn to the question of whether the UPB framework deals with matters of ethics, or aesthetics, or both.

UPB: Ethics or Aesthetics?

In general, we will use the term aesthetics to refer to non-enforceable preferences – universal or personal – while ethics or morality will refer to enforceable preferences. It is universally preferable (i.e. required) to use the scientific method to validate physical theories, but we cannot use force to inflict the scientific method on those who do not use it, since not using the scientific method is not a violent action.

Non-violent actions by their very nature are avoidable. If a physicist stops using the scientific method, but instead starts consulting tarot cards, he is not violently inflicting his choice on me, and I can avoid him. A rapist, on the other hand, is violently inflicting his preferences upon his victim.

Although we first focused on UPB in the realm of ethics, UPB can now be seen as an “umbrella term,” which includes such disciplines as:

• The scientific method
• Logic
• Empiricism
• Debating
• Language
• Ethics

Ethics is the subset of UPB which deals with inflicted behaviour, or the use of violence. Any theory that justifies or denies the use of violence is a moral theory, and is subject to the requirements of logical consistency and empirical evidence.

Let us look at three actions, to help us further distinguish between ethics and aesthetics. The first action is irrationality; the second is lying; the third is murder. (Please note that the examples below are not proofs, but rather situations that a valid ethical theory should be able to encompass and explain. We will get to the actual proofs shortly.)

Irrationality

Let’s say that you and I are having a debate about the existence of God. After I put forth my arguments, you clap your hands over your ears, singing out that God is telling you that He exists, and therefore all of my arguments mean nothing. Clearly, your response to my position is irrational. However annoying I might find your behaviour, though, it would scarcely seem reasonable for me to vent my frustration by pulling out a gun and shooting you. I believe that it is universally preferable to use logic and evidence rather than rely on voices in our heads, but this universal preference is not reasonably enforceable in the physical sense, through violence or the threat thereof.

Lying

Let’s say that you and I set the rules for a debate, and we both agree to judge the question of the existence of God according to reason and evidence. If, as the debate continues, you fall back to a position of blind faith, and reject my arguments despite their rationality and evidence, you are not keeping your word. In other words, you were lying when you said that the question would be decided by reason and evidence.

The difference between these two situations (irrationality versus lying) is the difference between a contractual and a non-contractual arrangement. If I hand you $100 and then walk away, I cannot justly come up to you in a year and say that you now owe me $100, because it was a loan. If, on the other hand, you agree to pay me back the money in a year, and then fail to do so, that is quite a different situation.

In the example of “lying,” although you have clearly broken your word, and wasted my time, it would not seem to be either moral or reasonable for me to pull out a gun and shoot you.

A reasonable moral theory should be able to explain why this is the case.

Murder

If you rush at me with a knife raised, few people would argue with my right to defend myself. If shooting you were the only way that I could reasonably ensure my own safety, it would generally be considered a regrettable necessity.

Requirements for Ethics

Certain preconditions must exist, or be accepted, in order for ethical judgments or theories to have any validity or applicability. Clearly, choice and personal responsibility must both be accepted as axioms. If a rock comes bouncing down a hill and crashes into your car, we do not hold the rock morally responsible, since it has no consciousness, cannot choose, and therefore cannot possess personal responsibility. If the rock dislodged simply as a result of time and geology, then no one is responsible for the resulting harm to your car. If, however, you saw me push the rock out of its position, you would not blame the rock, but rather me. To add a further complication, if it turns out that I dislodged the rock because another man forced me to at gunpoint, you would be far more likely to blame the gun-toting initiator of the situation rather than me.

As we have discussed above, entering into any debate requires an acceptance of the realities of choice, values and personal responsibility.

However, these factors are also present in the choice of the color of paint for a room, yet we would scarcely say that selecting a hue is a moral choice. Thus there must be other criteria which must be present in order for a choice or proposition to be moral.

We all have preferences – from the merely personal (“I like ice cream”) to the socially preferable (“It is good to be on time”) to universal morality (“Thou shalt not murder”).

There is little point writing a book about personal preferences – and we can turn to Ann Landers for a discussion of socially preferable behaviour – here, then, we will focus on the possibility of Universally Preferable Behaviour.

Choice

If I accept your invitation to a dinner party, but find the conversation highly offensive, I can decide to get up and leave – and I can also choose to never accept another invitation from you. This capacity for escape and/or avoidance is an essential characteristic differentiating aesthetics from ethics.

If, however, when I decide to leave your dinner party, you leap up and chain me to my chair, clearly I no longer have the free choice to leave. This is the moment at which your rudeness becomes overt aggression, and crosses the line from aesthetics to ethics.

If, after vowing monogamy, I cheat on my wife, and she decides to leave me, I have certainly done her wrong, but the wrong that I have done by cheating would be very different from the wrong I would do if I lock her in the basement to prevent her from leaving. We would not generally consider a wife who shoots her husband for infidelity to be acting morally, but we would recognize the regrettable necessity if she had to use violence to escape from her imprisonment. In the first situation, the wife has the free choice and capacity to leave her husband, and thus violence would be an unjust response to the situation; in the second situation, her choice to leave her husband has been eliminated through imprisonment. Infidelity does not destroy a partner’s capacity to choose; locking her in the basement does.

Avoidance

If you and I are both standing at the top of a cliff, and I turn to you and say, “Stand in front of me, so I can push you off the cliff,” what would your response be? If you do voluntarily stand in front of me, and I then push you off the cliff, this would more likely be considered a form of suicide on your part, rather than murder on my part. The reason for this is that you can very easily avoid being pushed off the cliff, simply by refusing to stand in front of me.

Similarly, if I meet you in a bar, and say: “I want you to come back to my place, so I can tie you to the bed and starve you to death,” if you do in fact come back to my place, it is with the reasonable knowledge that your longevity will not be enhanced by your decision. On the other hand, if I slip a “date rape” drug into your drink, and you wake up tied to my bed, it is clear that there is little you could have done to avoid the situation.

This question of avoidance is key to differentiating aesthetics from ethics. Aesthetics applies to situations that may be unpleasant, but which do not eliminate your capacity to choose.

Avoidance and Initiation

There is a particular issue with avoidance that will come up later in this book, which is worth clearing up here beforehand.

If I live on a high mountaintop 5,000 miles away from you, and send you an e-mail telling you that if you ever walk in front of my house, I am going to shoot you, it is relatively easy for you to avoid this situation. My threat of force is certainly immoral, but questions would surely be raised if you immediately jumped on a plane, climbed my mountain and slowly strolled in front of my house.

On the other hand, if you live on a dead-end street, and I tell you that if you take that street to get home, I will shoot you, your capacity to avoid this situation becomes significantly limited. You could certainly tunnel into your house, or jump over a bunch of backyard fences, but all of this would be considerably inconvenient.

In a similar manner, if a representative of organized crime comes to my house and threatens to burn it down if I do not pay regular protection money, I can avoid that specific threat by moving to another continent, but that would seem like a rather unjust way to deal with the situation, since I must now initiate action in order to avoid the threat.

For the moment, we can assume that any threat of the initiation of violence is immoral, but the question of avoidance – particularly the degree of avoidance required – is also important. In general, the more that a threat interferes with the normal course of daily actions, the more egregious it is. If I have to fly to another continent in order to walk in front of your house, that is scarcely an everyday activity. If I am threatened with violence for walking down the only road towards my own home, that is a far worse intrusion upon my liberties. If I have to take specific and unprecedented action to trigger a threat, that is one thing – if I trigger the threat through normal everyday activities, that is quite another. Telling you I will slap you if you stand on your head on the dark side of the moon is scarcely a threat – telling you I will slap you if you breathe is.

Ethics, Aesthetics and Avoidability

Let’s say that you and I agree to meet at a certain location at 6 p.m. sharp – but then I show up half an hour late. What would your reaction be? At first, you may be a little annoyed. If I tell you that I was delayed because I stopped to give a dying man CPR and saved his life, your annoyance would likely be replaced with admiration. On the other hand, if I tell you that I am late because I was playing a video game, your annoyance would probably increase. A dying man’s need for CPR is unexpected, and therefore pretty much unavoidable – continuing to play a video game is easily avoidable, and clearly shows a lack of consideration for you.

It is this capacity to avoid situations that forms a central root of ethical judgments. A woman raped by a random intruder in her own home is undoubtedly the complete victim of a terrible crime. A woman who gets raped after getting blind drunk at a frat party and dancing naked on a tabletop presents a more complicated case. Clearly the rape, once underway, cannot be avoided, since it is being violently inflicted – however, situations which increase the likelihood of rape can be avoided.

If someone breaks into my house and takes my wallet at gunpoint, I have every right to be outraged. If, however, I leave my wallet sitting on a park bench for a week, do I have the same right to be outraged when I return to find it gone? Instinctively we feel that this would seem to be less justified.

Clearly, this question of avoidance is central to our moral evaluation of cause and effect. Illnesses that strike without warning, and which cannot be prevented, frighten us far more than those that we can avoid. We can minimize the chances of getting lung cancer by refraining from smoking, just as we can help prevent skin cancer by using sunscreen, and avoid broken bones by eschewing extreme sports. Similarly, we can do much to avoid crime through some fairly simple habits, such as choosing moral companions, avoiding locales and situations where crime is more probable, refraining from substance abuse and so on.

There is a phenomenon known as “death by cop,” wherein suicidal people provoke an altercation with the police, then pretend to reach for a gun in order to get shot. This is an extreme example of pursuing situations where “victimization” is almost guaranteed. This can also occur in domestic situations, wherein a wife will verbally attack a drunken husband, knowing perfectly well that alcohol inflames his violent temper.

In these situations, we can have some sympathy for the man whose wallet is stolen in the park, or the woman who is attacked at the frat party, or the wife who is beaten by her husband – but at the same time, we would have some significant questions regarding their role or complicity in the wrongs they have suffered. To be just, we must differentiate between a man whose wallet is stolen at gunpoint, and a man who leaves his wallet lying around in a public place. Both men have had their wallets stolen, to be sure, but it would scarcely seem reasonable to hold them equally accountable.

Can the UPB framework help us understand, classify and extend these moral standards?

Initiation

A reasonable moral theory should be able to explain all of the above universal standards, just as a reasonable theory of physics should be able to explain how a man can unconsciously calculate the arc of a thrown baseball, and catch it.

If the framework of UPB can explain the above, then it will certainly have passed at least the “common sense” test.

This does not mean that some surprising – even shocking – conclusions may not result from our moral theory, but at least we shall have passed the first hurdle of explaining the obvious, before analyzing that which is far from obvious.

With that in mind, let us turn to the question of initiation.

A surgeon can “stab” you with a scalpel, but we can easily understand that his action is very different from a mugger who stabs you with a knife.

This difference can be understood through a further analysis of initiation.

If you get cancer, you may ask a surgeon to operate on you. The reason that the surgeon’s “stab” is not immoral is that the cancer “initiated” an attack upon your life and health. The surgeon is acting as a “surrogate self-defense agent,” just like a man who shoots a mugger who is attacking you. You have also given your consent to the surgeon, and bound his behaviour by a specific contract.

The mugger who stabs you, however, is initiating an attack upon your life and health, which is why his attack is the moral opposite of the surgeon’s efforts.

If I am a chronic and longtime smoker, I have participated in the chain of events that lead to my lung cancer. By initiating and maintaining the habit of smoking, I have set into motion a chain of causality that can result in a life-threatening affliction. It is certainly possible for me to get lung cancer without smoking – or smoke without getting lung cancer – but I certainly have affected the odds.

Similarly, it is possible for me to leave my wallet on a park bench for a week, return and find it still sitting there, but by leaving it there for such a long time, I certainly have affected the odds of it being gone.

On the other hand, if I stay home every night, I am not exactly courting crime, and so if a maniac invades my home and robs me blind, I cannot be reasonably blamed for any causal role I have played in the incident.

The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)

A moral rule is often proposed called the non-aggression principle, or NAP. It is also called being a “porcupine pacifist,” insofar as a porcupine only uses “force” in self-defense. The NAP is basically the proposition that “the initiation of the use of force is morally wrong.” Or, to put it more in the terms of our conversation: “The non-initiation of force is universally preferable.”

When we analyze a principle such as the NAP, there are really only seven possibilities: three in the negative, three in the positive, and one neutral:

1. The initiation of the use of force is always morally wrong.
2. The initiation of the use of force is sometimes morally wrong.
3. The initiation of the use of force is never morally wrong.
4. The initiation of the use of force has no moral content.
5. The initiation of the use of force is never morally right.
6. The initiation of the use of force is sometimes morally right.
7. The initiation of the use of force is always morally right.

As we have seen above, however, UPB is an “all or nothing” framework. If an action is universally preferable, then it cannot be limited by individual, geography, time etc. If it is wrong to murder in Algiers, then it is also wrong to murder in Belgium, the United States, at the North Pole and on the moon. If it is wrong to murder yesterday, then it cannot be right to murder tomorrow. If it is wrong for Bob to murder, then it must also be wrong for Doug to murder.

Uniting the NAP with UPB, thus allows us to whittle these seven statements down to three:

1. It is universally preferable to initiate the use of force.
2. It is universally preferable to not initiate the use of force.
3. The initiation of the use of force is not subject to universal preferences.

This is the natural result of applying the requirement of rational consistency to ethical propositions. A rational theory cannot validly propose that opposite results can occur from the same circumstances. A scientific theory cannot argue that one rock must fall down, but another rock must fall up. Einstein did not argue that E=MC² on a Thursday, but that E=MC³ on a Friday, or on Mars, or during a blue moon. The law of conservation – that matter can be neither created nor destroyed – does not hold true only when you really, really want it to, or if you pay a guy to make it so, or when a black cat crosses your path. The laws of physics are not subject to time, geography, opinion or acts of Congress.

This consistency must also be required for systems of ethics, or UPB, and we will subject generally accepted moral theories to this rigour in Part 2, in a few pages.

However, since we are dealing with the question of consistency, it is well worth taking the time to deal with our capacity for inconsistency.

Lifeboat Scenarios

The fact that UPB only validates logically consistent moral theories does not mean that there can be no conceivable circumstances under which we may choose to act against the tenets of such a theory.

For instance, if we accept the universal validity of property rights, smashing a window and jumping into someone’s apartment without permission would be a violation of his property rights. However, if we were hanging off a flagpole outside an apartment window, and about to fall to our deaths, few of us would decline to kick in the window and jump to safety for the sake of obeying an abstract principle.

In the real world, it would take a staggeringly callous person to press charges against a man who destroyed a window in order to save his life – just as it would take a staggeringly irresponsible man to refuse to pay restitution for said window. The principle of “avoidability” is central here – a man hanging off a flagpole has little choice about kicking in a window. A man breaking into your house to steal things clearly has the capacity to avoid invading your property – he is not cornered, but is rather the initiator of the aggression. This is similar to the difference between the woman whose man cheats on her, versus the woman whose man locks her in the basement.

This is not to say that breaking the window to save your life is not wrong. It is, but it is a wrong that almost all of us would choose to commit rather than die. If I were on the verge of starving to death, I would steal an apple. This does not mean that it is right for me to steal the apple – it just means that I would do it – and must justly accept the consequences of my theft. (Of course, if I were such an incompetent or confused human being that I ended up on the verge of starvation, incarceration might be an improvement to my situation.)

Gray Areas

The fact that certain “gray areas” exist in the realm of ethics has often been used as a justification for rank relativism. Since on occasion some things remain unclear (e.g. who initiated the use of violence), and since it is impossible to define objective and exact rules for every conceivable situation, the conclusion is often drawn that nothing can ever be known for certain, and that no objective rules exist for any situation.

This is false.

All reasonable people recognize that biology is a valid science, despite the fact that some animals are born with “one-off” mutations. The fact that a dog can be born with five legs does not mean that “canine” becomes a completely subjective category. The fact that certain species of insects are challenging to differentiate does not mean that there is no difference between a beetle and a whale.

For some perverse reason, intellectuals in particular take great joy in the wanton destruction of ethical, normative and rational standards. This could be because intellectuals have so often been paid by corrupt classes of individuals such as politicians, priests and kings – or it could be that a man often becomes an intellectual in order to create justifications for his own immoral behaviour. Whatever the reason, most modern thinkers have become a species of “anti-thinker,” which is very odd. It would be equivalent to there being an enormous class of “biologists” who spent their entire lives arguing that the science of biology was impossible. If the science of biology is impossible, it scarcely makes sense to become a biologist, any more than an atheist should fight tooth and nail to become a priest.

Shades of Gray

In the realm of “gray areas,” there are really only three possibilities.

1. There are no such things as gray areas.
2. Certain gray areas do exist.
3. All knowledge is a gray area.

Clearly, option one can be easily discarded. Option three is also fairly easy to discard. The statement “all knowledge is a gray area” is a self-detonating proposition, as we have seen above, in the same way that “all statements are lies” also self-detonates.

Thus we must go with option two, which is that certain gray areas do exist, and we know that they are gray relative to the areas that are not gray. Oxygen exists in space, and also underwater, but not in a form or quantity that human beings can consume. The degree of oxygenation is a gray area, i.e. “less versus more”; the question of whether or not human beings can breathe water is surely black and white.

A scientist captured by cannibals may pretend to be a witch-doctor in order to escape – this does not mean that we must dismiss the scientific method as entirely invalid.

Similarly, there can be extreme situations wherein we may choose to commit immoral actions, but such situations do not invalidate the science of morality, any more than occasional mutations invalidate the science of biology. In fact, the science of biology is greatly advanced through the acceptance and examination of mutations – and similarly, the science of ethics is only strengthened through an examination of “lifeboat scenarios,” as long as such an examination is not pursued obsessively.

Universality and Exceptions

Before we start using our framework of Universally Preferable Behaviour to examine some commonly held ethical beliefs, we must deal with the question of “exceptions.”

Using the above “lifeboat scenarios,” the conclusion is often drawn that “the good” is simply that which is “good” for an individual man’s life.

In ethical arguments, if I am asked whether I would steal an apple rather than starve to death – and I say “yes” – the following argument is inevitably made:

1. Everyone would rather steal an apple than starve to death.
2. Thus everyone universally prefers stealing apples to death by starvation.
3. Thus it is universally preferable to steal apples rather than starve to death.
4. Thus survival is universally preferable to property rights.
5. Thus what is good for the individual is the ultimate moral standard.

This has been used as the basis for a number of ethical theories and approaches, from Nietzsche to Rand. The preference of each individual for survival is translated into ethical theories that place the survival of the individual at their centre. (Nietzsche’s “will to power” and Rand’s “that which serves man’s life is the good.”)

This kind of “biological hedonism” may be a description of the “drive to survive,” but it is only correct insofar as it describes what people actually do, not what they should do.

It also introduces a completely unscientific subjectivism to the question of morality. For instance, if it is morally permissible to steal food when you are starving, how much food can you steal? How hungry do you have to be? Can you steal food that is not nutritious? How nutritious does the food have to be in order to justify stealing it? How long after stealing one meal are you allowed to steal another meal? Are you allowed to steal meals rather than look for work or appeal to charity?

Also, if I can make more money as a hit man than a shopkeeper, should I not pursue violence as a career? It certainly enhances my survival... and so on and so on.

As we can see, the introduction of “what is good for man in the abstract – or what most people do – is what is universally preferable” destroys the very concept of morality as a logically consistent theory, and substitutes mere biological drives as justifications for behaviour. It is an explanation of behaviour, not a proposed moral theory.

The Purpose – and the Dangers

With your patient indulgence, one final question needs to be addressed before we plunge into a definition and test how various moral propositions fit into the UPB framework. Since the hardest work lies ahead, we should pause for a moment and remind ourselves why we are putting ourselves through all this rigor and difficulty.

In other words, before we plunge on, it is well worth asking the question: “Why bother?”

Why bother with defining ethical theories? Surely good people don’t need them, and bad people don’t consult them. People will do what they prefer, and just make up justifications as needed after the fact – why bother lecturing people about morality?

Of course, the danger always exists that an immoral person will attack you for his own hedonistic purposes. It could also be the case that, despite clean and healthy living, you may be struck down by cancer before your time – the former does not make the science of morality irrelevant, any more than the latter makes the sciences of medicine, nutrition and exercise irrelevant. One demonstrable effect of a rational science of morality must be to reduce your chances of suffering immoral actions such as theft, murder and rape – and it is by this criterion that we shall also judge the moral rules proposed in Part 3 of this book.

The Beast

An objective review of human history would seem to point to the grim reality that by far the most dangerous thing in the world is false ethical systems.

If we look at an ethical system like communism, which was responsible for the murders of 170 million people, we can clearly see that the real danger to individuals was not random criminals, but false moral theories. Similarly, the Spanish Inquisition relied not on thieves and pickpockets, but rather priests and torturers filled with the desire to save the souls of others. Nazism also relied on particular ethical theories regarding the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the moral imperative to serve those in power, as well as theories “proving” the innate virtues of the Aryan race.

Over and over again, throughout human history, we see that the most dangerous instruments in the hands of men are not guns, or bombs, or knives, or poisons, but rather moral theories. From the “divine right of kings” to the endlessly legitimized mob rule of modern democracies, from the ancestor worship of certain Oriental cultures to the modern deference to the nation-state as personified by a political leader, to those who pledge their children to the service of particular religious ideologies, it is clear that by far the most dangerous tool that men possess is morality. Unlike science, which merely describes what is, and what is to be, moral theories exert a near-bottomless influence over the hearts and minds of men by telling them what ought to be.

When our leaders ask for our obedience, it is never to themselves as individuals, they claim, but rather to “the good” in the abstract. JFK did not say: “Ask not what I can do for you, but rather what you can do for me...” Instead, he substituted the words “your country” for himself. Service to “the country” is considered a virtue – although the net beneficiaries of that service are always those who rule citizens by force. In the past (and sometimes even into the present), leaders identified themselves with God, rather than with geography, but the principle remains the same. For Communists, the abstract mechanism that justifies the power of the leaders is class; for fascists it is the nation; for Nazis it is the race; for democrats it is “the will of the people”; for priests it is “the will of God” and so on.

Ruling classes inevitably use ethical theories to justify their power for the simple reason that human beings have an implacable desire to act in accordance to what they believe to be “the good.” If service to the Fatherland can be defined as “the good,” then such service will inevitably be provided. If obedience to military superiors can be defined as “virtue” and “courage,” then such violent slavery will be endlessly praised and performed.

Propaganda

The more false the moral theory is, the earlier that it must be inflicted upon children. We do not see the children of scientifically minded people being sent to “logic school” from the tender age of three or four onwards. We do not see the children of free market advocates being sent to “Capitalism Camp” when they are five years old. We do not see the children of philosophers being sent to a Rational Empiricism Theme Park in order to be indoctrinated into the value of trusting their own senses and using their own minds.

No, wherever ethical theories are corrupt, self-contradictory and destructive, they must be inflicted upon the helpless minds of dependent children. The Jesuits are credited with the proverb: “Give me a child until he is nine and he will be mine for life,” but that is only because the Jesuits were teaching superstitious and destructive lies. You could never imagine a modern scientist hungering to imprint his falsehoods on a newborn consciousness. Picture somebody like Richard Dawkins saying the above, just to see how ridiculous it would be.

Any ethicist, then, who focuses on mere criminality, rather than the institutional crimes supported by ethical theories, is missing the picture almost entirely, and serving mankind up to the slaughterhouse. A doctor who, in the middle of a universal and deadly plague, focused his entire efforts on communicating about the possible health consequences of being slightly overweight, would be considered rather deranged, and scarcely a reliable guide in medical matters. If your house is on fire, mulling over the colors you might want to paint your walls might well be considered a sub-optimal prioritization.

Private criminals exist, of course, but have almost no impact on our lives comparable to those who rule us on the basis of false moral theories.

Once, when I was 11, another boy stole a few dollars from me. Another time, when I was 26, I left my ATM card in a bank machine, and someone stole a few hundred dollars from my account.

On the other hand, I have had hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from me by force through the moral theory of “taxation is good.” I was forced to sit in the grim and brain-destroying mental gulags of public schools for 14 years, based on the moral theory that “state education is a virtue.” (Or, rather: “forced education is a virtue” – my parents were compelled to pay through taxes, and I was compelled to attend.)

The boy (and the man) who stole my money doubtless used it for some personal pleasure or need. The government that steals my money, on the other hand, uses it to oppress the poor, to fund wars, to pay the rich, to borrow money and so impoverish my children – and to pay the salaries of those who steal from me.

If I were a doctor in the middle of a great city struck down by a terrible plague, and I discovered that that plague was being transmitted through the water pipes, what should my rational response be – if I claimed to truly care about the health of my fellow citizens?

Surely I should cry from the very rooftops that their drinking water was causing the plague. Surely I should take every measure possible to get people to understand the true source of the illness that struck them down.

Surely, in the knowledge of such universal and preventable poisoning, I should not waste my time arguing that the true danger you faced was the tiny possibility that some random individual might decide to poison you at some point in the future.

Thus, as a philosopher concerned with violence and immorality, should I focus on private criminals, or public criminals?

The violations that I experienced at the hands of private criminals fade to insignificance relative to even one day under the tender mercies of my “virtuous and good masters.”

If, then, the greatest dangers to mankind are false ethical theories, then our highest prioritization should be the discovery, communication and refinement of a valid, rational, empirical and consistent ethical theory. If we discover that most plague victims are dying from impure water, then surely telling them to purify their water should be our first and highest priority.

Let us now turn to that task.

Part 2: Application

Ethical Categories

With the UPB framework in place, we can now turn to an examination of how UPB validates or invalidates our most common moral propositions. If our “theory of physics” can explain how a man can catch a baseball, we have at least passed the first – and most important – hurdle, and struck our first and deepest blow against the beast.

The Seven Categories

As mentioned above, propositions regarding universally preferable behaviour fall into three general categories – positive, negative and neutral. To help us separate aesthetics from ethics, let us start by widening these categories to encompass any behaviour that can be subjected to an ethical analysis. These seven categories are:

1. It is good (universally preferable and enforceable through violence, such as “don’t murder”).
2. It is aesthetically positive (universally preferable but not enforceable through violence, such as “politeness” and “being on time”).
3. It is personally positive (neither universally preferable nor enforceable, such a predilection for eating ice cream).
4. It is neutral, or has no ethical or aesthetic content, such as running for a bus.
5. It is personally negative (predilection for not eating ice cream).
6. It is aesthetically negative (“rudeness” and “being late”).
7. It is evil (universally proscribed) (“rape”).

Ideally, we should be able to whittle these down to only two categories – universally preferable and aesthetically positive – by defining our ethical propositions so that what is universally banned is simply a mirror image of what is universally preferable, and ditching merely personal preferences and neutral actions as irrelevant to a discussion of ethics.

For instance, the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) states that the initiation of the use of force is immoral – thus the non-initiation of the use of force is universally preferable, while the initiation of the use of force is universally banned. If what is banned is simply the opposite of what is preferable, there is really no need for an additional category.

Furthermore, as moral philosophers, we must prioritize our examination of rational ethics by focussing on the most egregious violations. Clearly, the most immoral actions must be the violent enforcement of unjust preferences upon others. If actions such as “theft” or “murder” are defined as UPB, the examination of such definitions must be our very highest priority.

Thus we shall focus our efforts primarily on universally preferable and enforceable actions.

Virtue and its Opposite

The opposite of “virtue” must be “vice” – the opposite of “good” must be “evil.” If I propose the moral rule, “thou shalt not steal,” then stealing must be evil, and not stealing must be good. This does not mean that “refraining from theft” is the sole definition of moral excellence, of course, since a man may be a murderer, but not a thief. We can think of it as a “necessary but not sufficient” requirement for virtue.

Each morally preferable action must by its very nature have an opposite action – because if it does not, then there is no capacity for choice, no possibility of avoidance, and therefore no capacity for virtue or vice. If I propose the moral rule: “thou shalt defy gravity,” then clearly morality becomes impossible, immorality cannot be avoided, and therefore the moral rule must be invalid.

If I propose the moral rule: “thou shalt not go to San Francisco,” this can be logically rephrased as: “thou shalt go anywhere but San Francisco.” In this way, the moral rule “thou shalt not steal” can be equally proposed in the positive form – “thou shalt respect property rights.” Since respecting property rights is a virtue, violating property rights must be a vice.

What is Missing

Conspicuously absent from the above list are traditional virtues such as courage, honesty, integrity and so on – as well as their opposites: cowardice, falsehood and corruption.

It may seem that these virtues should fall into the realm of aesthetically positive behaviour, such as being on time, but I for one have far too much respect for the traditional virtues to place them in the same category as social niceties. The reason that they cannot be placed into the category of universally preferable is that, as we mentioned above, the framework of UPB only deals with behaviours, not with attitudes, thoughts, states of mind or emotions. The scientific method can process a logical proposition; it cannot process “anger” or “foolhardiness.” These states of mind are not unimportant, of course – in fact, they are essential – but they cannot be part of any objective system for evaluating ethical propositions, since they are essentially subjective – and therefore unprovable – states of being.

Thus UPB can only deal with objectively verifiable actions such as murder, assault and so on.

The First Test: Rape

Although it is an unpleasant topic to discuss, rape is without a doubt the least ambiguous action that any moral theory must encompass. Murder can be complicated by self-defense; theft by the problem of starvation or “stealing back” – but one can never rape in self-defense; it is by its very definition the initiation of aggression.

Let us then use the UPB framework to examine the logical consistency of ethical propositions regarding rape, with reference to these seven moral categories.

1. The Good

To take an absurd example, let’s imagine that we are reviewing an ethical theory that proclaims that rape is a moral good.

Clearly, if I proclaim that “X” is “the good,” then the opposite of “X” must be evil. If not raping is good, then raping must be evil. Conversely, if raping is good, then not raping must be evil.

Raping someone is a positive action that must be initiated, executed, and then completed. If “rape” is a moral good, then “not raping” must be a moral evil – thus it is impossible for two men in a single room to both be moral at the same time, since only one of them can be a rapist at any given moment – and he can only be a rapist if the other man becomes his victim.

That which enables virtue cannot be evil. “Freedom,” for instance, is a prerequisite for virtue – without freedom, we cannot be virtuous – thus “freedom” cannot be evil, since it is required for goodness.

If it is morally good to be a rapist, and one can only be a rapist by sexually assaulting a victim, then clearly the victim must be morally good by resisting the sexual assault – since if he does not resist, it is by definition not rape, and therefore not virtuous. In other words, attacking virtue by definition enables virtue. Thus we have an insurmountable paradox, in which the victim must attack virtue in order to enable virtue – he must resist sexual assault in order to enable the “virtue” of the rapist. Thus not only can the rape victim not be virtuous, but he must resist and attack “virtue” in order to allow it.

Insurmountable logical problems thus result from the proposition: “rape is moral.” Remember, we agreed that a rational theory cannot propose opposite states for the same situation. All other things being equal, a rock cannot fall both up and down at the same time, and a valid theory cannot predict that one rock will fall up, while another rock will fall down.

In the same way, two men in a room must be considered to be in the same situation. If only one of them can be good, because goodness is defined as rape, and only one of them can rape at any time, then we have a logical contradiction that cannot be resolved.

Also, if we recall that Universally Preferable Behaviour must be independent of time, then we also face a logical problem that, no matter what his physical virility, at some point the rapist will simply be unable to rape anymore, because he will be physically unable to get an erection. At that point, his ability to perform the “good action” becomes impossible. Since “avoidability” is a key criterion for morality, but he is physically unable to be good – in other words, he is unable to avoid being evil – then he cannot be responsible for not raping the other man.

If a man hanging from a tree over a canyon lets go because he lacks the strength to continue holding on, we would not call that a suicide, since the choice to hang on was no longer available to him. If he lets go although he has the strength to continue holding on, the case would not be quite so clear.

The Coma Test

Intuitively, it is hard to imagine that any theory ascribing immorality to a man in a coma could be valid. Any ethical theory that posits a positive action as universally preferable behaviour faces the challenge of “the coma test.” If I say that giving to charity is a moral absolute, then clearly not giving to charity would be immoral. However, a man in a coma is clearly unable to give to charity, and thus would, by my theory, be classified as immoral. Similarly, a man who is asleep, or has no money to give – or the man currently receiving charity – would all be immoral.

This is another central problem with any theory that posits a positive action such as “rape” as moral. At any given time, there are any number of people who are unable to perform such positive actions, who must then be condemned as evil, even though they have no capacity to be “good.”

However, if it is impossible to avoid being “evil,” then clearly evil as a concept makes no sense. In the example above of the rock crashing down a hill, the rock is not “evil” for hitting your car, since it has no capacity to avoid it of its own free will. If a man’s brakes fail right after they have been serviced, then it is not his responsibility for failing to come to a stop. If he has never once had his brakes serviced in ten years, then his irresponsibility is the proximate cause of his continued momentum, and he can be blamed.

In this way, the concept of “avoidability” retains its use. A man in a coma is unable to avoid lying in his bed, since he is in a state of quasi-unconsciousness. Since he is unable to avoid his actions – or inaction in this case – his immobility cannot be immoral.

At this point, the objection can quite reasonably be raised that if a man in a coma cannot be immoral, then he also cannot be moral. However, earlier we said that the opposite of an immoral action must be moral. If we propose the moral rule, “thou shalt not rape,” then can we call the man in a coma moral, since he does not rape?

Capacity

The concept of “avoidability” works in the positive as well as in the negative. If I have lost my genitals in some ghastly accident, am I moral for refraining from rape? It would seem hard to argue that I could be, since genital rape at least is impossible for me. Similarly, we may call a man “generous” if he gives $100 to a beggar – however, we would doubtless revise our estimation if it turned out that he gave away his money while sleepwalking, and woefully regretted his action on waking.

Thus we can reasonably say that where choice is absent, or inapplicable, morality is also absent, or inapplicable. Thus the man in a coma, while his actions cannot be considered evil, neither can they be considered good. He exists in the state without choice, like an infant, or an animal – thus he can be reasonably exempted from moral rules, since there is a physical state that objectively differentiates him from a man who can choose, which is allowable under UPB.

With that in mind, let us continue our examination of rape.

2. Aesthetically Positive

Aesthetically positive actions (APAs) are universally preferable, but not enforceable through violence, since aesthetically negative actions do not initiate the use of force. As we discussed above, if I am late in meeting you, I have not initiated the use of force against you, and I have not removed your capacity to choose, or avoid the situation.

If we say that APAs can be enforced through violence, then we are saying that the initiation of violence is morally good.

If we propose a moral rule that the initiation of violence is morally good, then this rule faces all the same logical impossibilities as the rule that “rape is morally good.”

Two men in a room cannot be both morally good at the same time, since one of them must be initiating violence against the other, and the other must be resisting it – since if he is not resisting it, it is by definition not violence, as in the case of the surgeon we discussed above. Thus virtue can only be enabled by resisting virtue, and two men in the same circumstances cannot both be moral at the same time, and so on – all of which are violations of UPB.

Thus we know that rape cannot be an APA.

We can confirm this by reviewing the reasons why “being on time” is an APA.

First of all, we instinctively understand that it is more just to reject a friend for being perpetually late than it is to reject a friend for not liking ice cream.

Why is that?

Once again, the UPB framework comes to the rescue.

An APA is a non-coercive rule that can be rationally applied to both parties simultaneously.

For instance, if my APA is: “be on time,” then it can be a universal standard that can be totally avoided. I cannot forcefully inflict this APA on you because you do not have to be my friend, you do not have to be on time, you do not have to respect or follow my preferences in any way whatsoever. (This is very different from a physical assault, which destroys your capacity for free choice.)

If “being on time” is an APA, then it is possible for two people to achieve it simultaneously – if they are both on time.

With rape though, as we have seen above, it is impossible for two people to perform it at the same time. One must always be the rapist, and the other always the victim.

On the other hand, if I say that “liking jazz” is an APA, then I immediately run into a logical impossibility. Remember, APAs are non-coercive rules that can be rationally applied to both parties simultaneously – the correct formulation for “liking jazz” is: “subjective preferences are universally preferable.”

Not only is this a rank contradiction in terms of syntax, but it also immediately fails the test of UPB. If I prefer jazz to all other forms of music, but you prefer classical music to all other forms, and if personal preferences are universally preferable, then you should prefer jazz because I do, and I should prefer classical because you do. This, of course, is impossible, because it would require that we both simultaneously prefer both jazz and classical above all other forms of music. You must switch your preference to jazz, because of my preference – but I must at the same time switch my preference to classical, because of your preference. This is like saying that you must both throw and catch the same baseball at exactly the same moment – a logical and physical impossibility.

Since APAs are not enforceable through violence – you cannot shoot a man for being late – then rape cannot be an APA, since rape by definition is a sexual attack enforced through violence.

Thus rape cannot fall into the category of APAs.

3. Personally Positive

Perhaps rape is akin to a merely personal preference. (It cannot be argued that rape does not involve a preference, since rape is a behaviour and, as we have discussed above, all behaviours involve preference.)

The question then arises: can the classification of rape as a merely personal preference stand up to logical scrutiny?

If we propose the moral rule: “personal preferences must be violently inflicted upon other people,” how does that stand up to the framework of UPB? (Note that I cannot propose that “personal preferences may be violently inflicted upon other people, since that is a violation of UPB, which states that moral rules must be absolute and universal – if they are not, they fall into APA territory, and so cannot be inflicted on others.)

Personal preferences cannot be justly inflicted upon other people, because that would create an insurmountable logical paradox.

If I say that liking the band Queen above all others is universally preferable behaviour, on what grounds could I justify that statement? Only by saying that all personal preferences should be inflicted upon other people. However, if my personal preferences can be inflicted upon you at will, then by the very definition of UPB, your personal preferences can also be inflicted upon me at will. Thus we cannot both be moral at the same time, since that would require that we both prefer our own bands while at the same time surrendering that preference to the preferred bands of each other. In other words, I must simultaneously think that Queen is the best band, and that The Police is the best band. This is a logical impossibility, which is a central reason why mere personal preferences cannot be universally enforceable.

Thus if rape is considered to be a merely personal preference, then it cannot logically be enforced upon anybody else. Again, thinking of the two men in a room, this would require that both men prefer to rape each other, but remain utterly unable to enforce that decision, which is not only illogical, but also fortunately completely impractical.

Finally, since personal preferences cannot be enforced on others, but rape is by definition the enforcement of a “preference” upon another, rape cannot be in the moral category of merely personal preferences.

4. Morally Neutral

As discussed above, rape cannot be a morally neutral action, since it is a preference that is enforced upon another.

5. Personally Negative

Perhaps rape is a personally negative action, the opposite of number three. As an example, a criminal on the run would consider capture a personally negative action (PNA).

Personally negative actions (PNAs) by definition cannot be enforced upon another. Thus a man being raped would be wrong to “inflict” his preference for not being raped upon his rapist, in the form of self-defence. In this way, the initiation of violence – the enforcement of a personal preference – is moral, while self-defence – also the enforcement of a personal preference – is immoral. Thus we would have the same actions (the enforcement of a personal preference) classified as both moral and immoral, which cannot stand.

6. Aesthetically Negative

Perhaps rape is an aesthetically negative action, like “being late” – the flipside of number two above. However, aesthetically negative actions (ANAs) cannot logically be violently enforced because by definition they can be avoided. Since I can freely choose to stop associating with a man who continually shows up late, I cannot shoot him for being late.

However, rape by definition cannot be avoided, since it is a sexual attack enforced through violence. (We can avoid situations which increase the likelihood of rape, but we cannot avoid a rape in progress.) Also, if I choose to stop being friends with the tardy man mentioned above, he cannot justly force me to be his friend by threatening me with violence, since that would rely on the principle that merely personal preferences can be enforced on others, which would run fruitlessly up against my ability to enforce my desire to drop his friendship. This kind of “Tarantino morality” always ends up with everyone in a state of mute paralysis, pointing guns at each other’s faces like frozen statues.

As we have already established, any universally preferable behaviour must be universal to all people in all places at all times – if ANAs allow for violent enforceability (i.e. I can shoot you for being late) – then if rape is defined as an ANA which can be enforced, then the rape victim who finds rape an aesthetically negative action has the right to shoot his rapist, which effectively affirms the principle of self-defense, but at the expense of also allowing gunplay in the opposition of, say, rudeness.

Thus rape cannot be an ANA.

Which leaves only…

7. Evil

If rape is defined as evil, then it must involve the initiation of the use of force, which clearly it does. Also, the proposition: “rape is evil,” passes the “coma test,” insofar as it is impossible for a man in a coma to rape someone.

In addition, if rape is evil, then not raping must be good – in this way, two men in a room can both be moral at the same time, simply by not raping each other.

Since avoidability is one of the key differentiators between “unpleasant” and “immoral,” and rape is clearly an unavoidable behaviour, the definition of “rape as evil” also conforms to this distinction.

Also, since there are times when it is physically impossible to rape someone – for instance, when an erection cannot be attained – the definition of “rape as evil” solves the problem of people being involuntarily immoral, which is by definition impossible, due to the criterion of avoidability.

The rapist may justify his actions by avoiding the proposition “rape is good,” and instead substituting another proposition that supports his desire to rape, such as: “It is moral to take one’s own pleasure, regardless of the displeasure of others.”

This proposition also fails the most basic logical test of UPB. If Bob believes that he should take his own pleasure by raping Doug – regardless of Doug’s displeasure – then Bob cannot rationally elevate his preference to a UPB.

If everyone should take their own pleasure regardless of their victim’s displeasure, then Bob has no right to rape Doug, since although Bob prefers to rape Doug, Doug most certainly does not prefer to be raped. If everyone should take their pleasure regardless of the displeasure of others, then there is no rational reason why Bob’s preference to rape Doug should take precedence over Doug’s preference to not be raped, regardless of the displeasure that refusing to be raped would cause Bob.

Thus Doug can say to Bob: “It is morally good for me to rape you, because personal preferences can be violently enforced.” Bob, of course, can then reply: “It is then morally good for me to violently resist your attack, since my personal preference to not be raped can also be violently enforced.”

Of course, few rapists are philosophers, but as we mentioned above, the primary danger to human beings is not the individual criminal, but irrational and exploitive moral theories. For instance, incarceration is inevitably justified through an appeal to a moral theory – and incarceration causes far more people to be raped than private criminals could ever dream of. If the moral theory that justifies incarceration is incorrect, then correcting this moral theory should be by far the highest concern of anyone wishing to reduce the prevalence of rape.

Thus it would seem that the only logical possibility for rape is that not raping is universally preferable behaviour – or that rape is universally banned behaviour.

Whew!

The fact that the UPB framework has logically and effectively validated the moral proposition that rape is evil – not “good,” or “aesthetically preferable,” or “personally preferable,” or “morally neutral” – is a very good sign. It does not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that UPB will logically validate all “common sense” moral propositions, but the first hurdle has been passed, and that should give us great cause for celebration. If I were a physicist proposing a Unified Field Theory, and the application of my theory correctly predicted where a thrown baseball would land, I could justly be enormously pleased.

Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted that light would bend around a gravity well – when this was first confirmed, it did not prove his theory beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it did prove that the theory could be true, which was a great leap forward. The first validation is always the hardest, because it is so easy to get things wrong, and error always outnumbers accuracy.

The UPB framework has correctly validated our moral premise that rape is evil. This is a necessary – but not sufficient – criterion for proof, and fully supports additional investigation.

Thus, let us continue…

The Second Test: Murder

Let us now test the UPB framework against moral propositions regarding murder, which here is defined as killing intentionally and with premeditation, not in self-defense.

Since we spent so much time dissecting the question of rape – and since many of the same arguments will apply here – this analysis can be much briefer.

Let us return to our two moral guinea pigs sitting in a room – we’ll call them Bob and Doug.

If murder is morally good, then clearly refraining from murder is immoral. Thus the only chance that Bob and Doug have to be moral is in the instant that they simultaneously murder each other. Physically, this is impossible of course – if they both stand and grip each other’s throats, they will never succumb to strangulation at exactly the same moment. If Bob dies first, his grip on Doug’s throat will loosen, thus condemning Doug to the status of immorality until such time as he can find another victim. Because Bob dies first – and thus cannot continue to try murdering Doug – Bob’s death renders him more immoral than Doug’s murder.

Intuitively, we fully recognize the insanity of the moral proposition that murder is good. Logically, we know that the proposition is incorrect because if it is true, it is impossible for two men in a room to both be moral at the same time. Morality, like health, cannot be considered a mere “snapshot,” but must be a process, or a continuum. The UPB framework confirms that Bob cannot be “evil” while he is strangling Doug, and then achieve the pinnacle of moral virtue the moment that he kills Doug – and then revert immediately back to a state of evil. Moral propositions must be universal, and independent of time and place. The proposition that murder is moral fails this requirement at every level, and so is not valid.

If murder were morally good, then it would also be the case that a man stranded on a desert island would be morally evil for as long as he lived there, since he would have no victims to kill. A man in a coma would also be evil, as would a sleeping man, or a man on the operating table. A torturer would be an evil man as long as he continued to torture – but then would become a good man in the moment that his victim died at his hand.

We can thus see that the proposition that “murder is good” is not only instinctively bizarre, but also logically impossible.

The other objections that applied to the proposition “rape is good” also apply here. Murder cannot be morally neutral, since morally neutral judgments or actions cannot be forcibly inflicted upon another, and murder by definition is forcibly inflicted upon another.

There is also a basic contradiction involved in any universal justification for the act of murder, just as there was in the act of rape. If Bob tries to strangle Doug, but Doug resists, how could Bob rationally justify his actions according to UPB?

Well, he could say something like: “a man’s life can be taken any time you want to” – but of course, since UPB is the only valid test of moral propositions, this justifies Doug killing Bob as much as it does Bob killing Doug. Thus Bob can only justify strangling Doug if Doug does not resist in any way – but of course if Doug does not resist, then can it really be considered murder?

Let us say that Bob then adjusts his premise to say: “I can shoot a man in his sleep anytime I want.” The problem here is not only the sleep that Bob will lose based on his universal premise, but also the logical impossibility of reversing moral propositions based on the differences in the states of sleeping and waking. Biologically speaking, a man does not become the opposite of a man when he falls asleep, any more than gravity reverses when he blinks.

Since a man remains a man when he falls asleep, it cannot be the case that opposite moral rules apply to him in this state. Thus to say that it is immoral to murder a man when he is awake, but it is moral to murder a him when he is asleep, is to create a logical contradiction unsupported by any objective biological facts. A physicist may say that a rock falls down, but a helium balloon rises up – but that is because a rock and a helium balloon have fundamentally different properties. No credible physicist can say that one rock falls down, but that another rock with almost exactly the same qualities falls up. The same is true for moral theories – no credible philosopher can say that morality reverses itself when a man is asleep, since a man’s nature does not fundamentally alter when he naps.

In this way, if we cannot justly shoot a man when he is awake, we also cannot shoot him when he is asleep, since he is still a man.

Thus, since the statement “I can shoot a man in his sleep anytime I want” cannot be validated according to UPB, it cannot be a true moral proposition.

Here again we find that the UPB framework holds true in terms of murder. The only possible valid moral theory regarding murder is that it is evil, or universally banned.

We could take the same approach to the question of assault, but the arguments would be identical to those of rape and murder, so for the sake of brevity, we shall continue.

Let us now turn to the question of theft. If this framework holds true here as well, then we have hit the perfect trifecta of our instinctual moral understanding, and found rational confirmation for our existing beliefs. We have discovered the math that explains how we are able to instinctively catch a ball, and that is a necessary start.

Self-Defense?

We have skirted over the issue of self-defense with regards to murder, though it is scarcely necessary to examine it in the case of rape. This is not because the issue of self-defense is either self-evident or uncomplicated, but rather because the complications that exist can be dealt with more comprehensively after we look at the question of theft.

The Third Test: Theft

We will have to spend a little bit more time on theft, since it inevitably brings into the picture the question of property rights, which is highly contentious for some.

There are many ways of approaching the question of property rights, from “homesteading” to legal definitions to practical considerations etc. I will address none of those here, because the question of property rights must fall into the framework of UPB, if UPB is to stand as a rational methodology for evaluating moral propositions.

Clearly, the moral proposition with regard to property rights is this: either human beings have the right to own property, or they do not.

Now the first “property” that must be dealt with is the body. “Ownership” must first and foremost consist of control over one’s own body, because if that control does not exist, or is not considered valid, then the whole question of morality – let alone property – goes out the window.

UPB is a framework for evaluating moral propositions, or arguments about universally preferable behaviour for all mankind. First and foremost, a man must be responsible for his own actions if they are to be judged morally, since as we have argued above, the capacity to choose actions is fundamental to any ethical evaluation.

If a man has no control over his body, then clearly he has no responsibility for his actions – they are not in fact “his” actions, but rather the actions of his body. Now, no one would rationally argue that if a man strangles another man, it is the murderous fingers that should be put on trial and punished. Clearly, the body cannot entirely control itself, but rather must be to some degree under the direction of the conscious mind.

What this means is that a man is responsible for the actions of his body, and therefore he is responsible for the effects of those actions. A man is responsible for where he puts his penis, which is how we know that we can judge him for raping someone. He “owns” the actions of his body as surely as he owns his body. To say that a man is responsible for his body but not the effects of his body is to argue that a man is responsible for aiming and throwing a knife, but not for where it lands.

Also, arguing that a man is not responsible for the effects of his body is a self-detonating statement, similar to the ones we examined above.

If I say to you: “Men are not responsible for the actions of their bodies,” it would be eminently fair for you to ask me who is working my vocal chords and mouth. If I say that I have no control over my speech – which is an effect of the body – then I have “sustained” my thesis at the cost of invalidating it completely.

If I am not at all responsible for my speech, then there is no point arguing with me. A tape recorder is also not responsible for its speech, which is why we tend not to get into virulent disagreements with magnetic strips. In cheesy horror movies, young girls seem to be particularly susceptible to demonic possession – the inevitable priest who shows up always offers to talk to the demon in charge of the girl, at which point the girl starts making a sound like Don Ho gargling with ball bearings.

This ridiculous portrait is accurate in one sense though – if some other being is in full control of the girl’s vocal chords, it is that being which needs to be addressed, not the girl, who has no control over her responses.

Thus if I say to you that I do not have control over my speech, you can ask me: who does? If I reply that no one does, then it makes about as much sense to argue with me as it does to argue with a television set, or the aforementioned boulder as it bounces down a hillside towards you car.

Thus the very act of controlling my body to produce speech demands the acceptance of my ability to control my speech – an implicit affirmation of my ownership over my own body.

Now, if demonic possession were a valid occurrence, and a girl possessed by a demon spat on a priest, we would not call the girl rude, but would rather pity her for being inhabited by such an impolite demon. Whoever has control over the girl’s body is culpable for the effects of her actions – this is why we would not call a man who stole while sleepwalking “evil,” since he did not have full control over his own body (although we may restrain him in other ways). This is also the basis for the legal defense of “not guilty by reason of insanity,” which is that we assume that a man who is insane does not have full control over his actions.

Thus to reject the ownership of the body is to reject all morality, which, as we have seen above, is utterly impossible. Logically, since morality is defined as an enforceable subset of UPB, to reject morality is to say that it is universally preferable to believe that there is no such thing as universal preferences.

Finally, to use one’s ownership of one’s own body in the form of speech to reject the notion that one can control one’s own body, is a blatant and insurmountable self-contradiction.

It is in this way that any rejection of self-ownership can be utterly discarded.

Since we own our bodies, we also inevitably own the effects of our actions, be they good or bad. If we own the effects of our actions, then clearly we own that which we produce, whether what we produce is a bow, or a book – or a murder.

Property and UPB

Even if we reject the above, we can still use UPB to definitively assert the existence of universal property rights.

As mentioned above, either human beings have property rights, or they do not. Except for a few gray areas, which we will get to shortly, this remains a universal proposition.

If a man does not have the right to use property, then he does not have the right to use his own body. He does not have the right to use his own lungs, and therefore must stop breathing. Although this sounds silly, it is an immediate and inevitable result of the premise that human beings do not have property rights.

It is fairly safe to assume that anyone you are debating property rights with is drawing breath, and thus agrees with you that he has the right to use his own body at least.

The question then comes up whether or not human beings have the right to exclusive property use. For instance, property could be defined as a sort of time-share principle of ownership, insofar as everyone should have the right to own everything, on some schedule or another.

This means of course that a man with lung cancer has a right to at least one lung of a healthy person. Since all ownership starts with the body, if we do not have the right to exclusive ownership over our own body, then we must share our body with other people, or be immoral. The sick man has a right to one of our lungs, and if we withhold it from him, that is exactly the same as stealing it. Similarly, both you and I have the right to use Celine Dion’s singing voice, since it is wholly selfish of her to pretend that she has exclusive ownership of it.

If human beings do not possess exclusive ownership over their own bodies, then the crime of rape becomes meaningless, since a woman clearly does not exclusively own her vagina, and neither does a man own his own various orifices. If exclusive self-ownership is not an axiom, then even the crime of murder becomes meaningless.

It is no crime to commit suicide, any more than it is to set fire to your own house, since the destruction of one’s own property is a valid exercise of ownership. However, if exclusive self-ownership is invalid, then there can be no distinction between murder and suicide. If my liver is failing, and I have a right to take yours, then I can “repossess” it in perfect accordance with morality and honourable behaviour. If this procedure kills you, so what? Without exclusive self-ownership, there is no “you” to begin with…

Thus we can reasonably say that exclusive self-ownership is a basic reality – that all human beings at all times and in all places have exclusive ownership over their own bodies, and thus have exclusive ownership over the effects of their own bodies, both in terms of moral behaviour and property creation or acquisition.

The Gray Areas

Naturally, any statement such as the above brings the inevitable howls of “complexity,” which I fully agree with.

Let us say that I mean to give you five dollars as a gift, but by mistake I hand you a $10 bill, saying, “This is for you.” Few people would consider it theft if I said, the moment after I handed it to you: “Sorry, I meant to give you five dollars, not ten,” and took the larger note back, even though I am taking back property that I have voluntarily relinquished.

On the other extreme, if you are one of my sons, and I pay for your university education, and explicitly tell you that you never need to pay me back, my generosity will doubtless affect your spending habits. It would scarcely seem reasonable for me to clap my forehead after your graduation ceremony and cry, “Oh, I thought you were one of my other sons!” and demand repayment.

Similarly, it is generally accepted that children cannot enter into legal contracts, but that adults can. In many societies, the differentiating age is 18 years. This means, of course, that at the stroke of midnight between a man’s 17^th year and 18^th birthday, his capacity to enter into legal contracts arrives fully formed. Has he gone through some massive biological transformation in that split second? Certainly not, although at 18 he is biologically very different than he was at the age of 10, both in terms of physical and mental development.

For the sake of efficiency, if not perfect morality, arbitrary transitions are often placed between one state and another. Childhood is definitely one state; adulthood is quite another. The transition between childhood and adulthood is blended; it is not black and white, but rather like the day descending into dusk, and then night. Noon is definitely not night, and midnight is definitely not daytime, but there are times in between when it is harder to tell, although the direction of the transition is always clear.

In the same way, a man who is greatly mentally deficient can be considered far less responsible for his own actions. A man with an IQ of 65 is mentally scarcely more than a little child – a man with an IQ of 100 is an average adult. If we say that a man with an IQ of 80 becomes responsible, then we are by definition saying that a man with an IQ of 79 is not responsible – is that a clear, fair, and utterly objective demarcation? Certainly not, but in order for most concepts to be practical, the criterion of “good enough” and a reasonable cost/benefit analysis must be put into place. As mentioned above, no water is perfectly pure, but waiting for perfect purity would simply cause a man to die of thirst.

Given that the question of moral responsibility and intellectual capacity only applies to a very small percentage of people right on the border, and that creating objective and perfect tests is very likely to prove impossible, there will inevitably be some “rules of thumb” that win the day. We can only assume that, since biologists live with this kind of occasional subjectivism every day, moral philosophers can somehow survive as well.

Property as Universality

UPB thus gives us clear options with regards to property rights. It cannot be the case that some men have property rights, while other men do not. It cannot be the case that men in Washington have property rights, while women in Baltimore do not. It cannot be the case that men have property rights today, but not tomorrow, and so on.

It also cannot be the case that men have only 50% property rights.

If I argue: “Men only have 50% property rights,” then I create yet another insurmountable contradiction. You may well ask me which half of my sentence was not generated by me. If I only have 50% property rights, then clearly I only have 50% control over my own body – if I put forward the above sentence, then clearly I am only in control of 50% of that sentence, since I only have 50% control over my voice. Who, then, is responsible for the other 50% of my sentence?

This may sound esoteric, but it is a deadly serious question, for reasons that we will get to shortly.

Let us say that we can somehow magically bypass the “50% ownership of the body” problem, and say that human beings only have 50% property rights when it comes to external objects.

How does that work in practice?

Well, if I have two lawnmowers and you have none, then clearly it would be logical for you to have the right to take one of my lawnmowers, since I can only ever own half of my lawnmower collection.

However, when you take possession of one of my lawnmowers, unfortunately you are only ever allowed to own half of that lawnmower, since we only have the right to 50% ownership over external objects. Thus you must immediately find somebody with whom you can share the lawnmower. This brings your “just” ownership down to 25%. However, your new co-owner cannot have the right to 25% of the lawnmower, because he only has 50% rights for whatever ownership he possesses – thus he must find somebody to take 50% of the 25% that he has – and so on and so on and so on.

The problem with any theory that argues for less than 100% property rights is that it instantly creates a “domino effect” of infinite regression, wherein everybody ends up with infinitely small ownership rights over pretty much everything, which is clearly impossible.

Thus it must be the case – both logically and practically – that we have full ownership over our own bodies, and over the effects of our bodies, in terms of external property. We do not need a homesteading theory, or other “just acquisition” approaches to justify property rights – they are justified because anybody who acts in any way, shape or form – including arguing – is axiomatically exercising 100% control over his own body, and “homesteading” both oxygen and sound waves in order to make his case.

Thus, by combining this axiomatic reality with UPB, we can easily understand that since anyone debating property rights is exercising 100% control over his own property, the only question is whether or not property rights vary from individual to individual – a question definitively settled by the axiomatic fact of self-ownership, as well as the UPB framework. Any moral proposition must be universal and consistent, and this is how we also know that everyone has 100% property rights.

Any other possibility is logically and empirically impossible.

Testing “Theft”

Let us return to our patient moral guinea pigs, Bob and Doug.

If theft is morally good, then once again we face the problem of the impossibility of simultaneous morality. If Bob has a lighter, and it is morally good to steal, then Doug must steal Bob’s lighter. However, the moment that Doug is stealing Bob’s lighter, Bob cannot himself be moral. The moment after Doug steals his lighter, Bob must then steal “his” lighter back – however, it is only “stealing” if the lighter is not legitimately Bob’s in the first place. When Doug steals Bob’s lighter, the lighter does not legitimately become Doug’s property, otherwise the concept of theft would make no sense. If, the moment I steal something, it becomes my legitimate property, then restitution would itself become theft. If, however, I do not establish legitimate ownership by stealing Bob’s lighter, then clearly it is impossible for Bob to “steal” the lighter back, because we cannot steal what we already own, and my theft has not invalidated Bob’s ownership of his lighter.

Thus, if stealing is good, then goodness becomes a state achievable only in the instant that Doug steals Bob’s lighter. In that instant, only Doug can be moral, and Bob cannot be. After that, goodness becomes impossible to achieve for either party, unless Doug keeps giving Bob’s lighter back and then snatching it away again.

Of course, it seems patently ridiculous to imagine that the ideal moral state is for one man to keep giving another man back the property he has stolen, and then immediately stealing it again. Thus logic seems to validate our instinctual understanding of the foolishness of this as a moral ideal – but let’s go a little further, to see if it still holds.

Remember, we are not particularly concerned with individual criminals, but rather with moral theories that justify violations of property rights. For instance, if Doug steals Bob’s lighter because Doug believes that “No property rights are valid,” then Doug’s moral theory instantly self-detonates.

If no property rights are valid, then stealing is a completely illogical action, since stealing is an assertion of the just desire to control property.

Property rights themselves are nothing more than the assertion of a just desire to retain control over assets. It is optional, insofar as you and I can join some hippie commune, and decide to never assert our property rights ever again. Or, if it becomes known in my neighbourhood that I am more than happy if somebody takes my property, it seems somewhat more likely that my lawnmower will go missing. Similarly, if I put a notebook computer on my front lawn with a sign saying “yours if you want it,” then I am clearly signalling that I have no desire to retain current or future control over the notebook.

If Doug steals Bob’s lighter, it is because Doug has a desire to gain control over the lighter – which is the very definition of property rights. If Doug steals Bob’s lighter because Doug believes that property rights are invalid, then what he is really saying is: “I want to gain control over Bob’s lighter because it is never valid to gain control over any object.”

If Doug does steal Bob’s lighter, but then defends his theft through a rejection of property rights, then clearly Doug cannot object to Bob taking his lighter back – since property rights are invalid, Doug now has no more valid claim to own the lighter than Bob did.

Finally, if Doug steals Bob’s lighter under the principle “theft is good,” then clearly Doug could have no logical objection to someone else stealing the lighter immediately. However, it would make precious little sense for Doug to spend time and energy stealing Bob’s lighter if the moment he had it in his hot little hands, someone else snatched it away from him. In other words, working to gain control of a piece of property is only valid if you can assert your property rights over the stolen object. No man will bother stealing a wallet if he has certain knowledge that it will be stolen from him the moment he gets his hands on it.

In other words, theft in practice is both an affirmation of property rights and a denial of property rights. Any moral theory that supports theft thus both affirms and denies the existence of property rights – an insurmountable contradiction which completely invalidates any such theory.

If we look at the moral aspects of communism, for instance, property rights are explicitly denied for the individual. However, those individuals who call themselves “the government” do claim the right to control property. What this means in practice is that it is evil for some men to control property, but it is good for other men to control property. Since there is no biological distinction in terms of species between ruler and ruled, we can clearly see that here, for the same species, we have completely opposite moral rules, which cannot be valid. UPB explicitly demands that moral rules be consistent for all men, in all places, and at all times – saying that it is immoral for Ivan Denisovich to exercise his property rights – but moral for Joseph Stalin to exercise his property rights – creates a rank contradiction, akin to saying that pouring water into a swimming pool both fills it and empties it at the same time. Any physicist who proposed the latter would be laughed out of his profession – moralists, however, regularly propose the former, and are greeted with mysterious levels of respect.

The Fourth Test: Fraud

Right at the edge of what is generally considered ethical sits the challenge of fraud.

Fraud is the obtaining of value through false representation. If I tell you that I will ship you an iPod if you give me $200, and then take your money without shipping you the iPod, we instinctively understand that that is a form of theft.

Let us put the problem of fraud through the grinder of UPB, and see whether it holds up.

Clearly, fraud requires that one person not be engaged in fraud. In the above potential transaction, if I am hoping to steal your $200, and you are hoping to steal my iPod, nothing will come of it. You will demand the iPod before providing payment, and I will demand payment before providing the iPod. We will be in a stalemate, utterly unable to defraud each other.

Clearly, for fraud to occur, one party must act in good faith. Thus the person who wishes to commit fraud relies on the fact that the other person does not wish to commit fraud, in order to prey upon him.

To return to our hapless moral guinea pigs, what would happen if we asked Bob and Doug to act on the moral principle that “fraud is good”?

If Doug has $20, and Bob has a lighter, and Doug offers Bob $20 for that lighter, and then takes the lighter but does not give Bob the $20, then Doug has been acting on the premise that fraud is good.

What happens then?

Clearly, the principle that “fraud is good” cannot be acted on by both Doug and Bob simultaneously – since in order to commit fraud, Doug must act dishonestly, and Bob must act honestly. Thus to enable Doug’s “moral” action, Bob must act “immorally.”

UPB destroys this possibility, since no valid moral theory can require opposite actions under the same circumstances.

If Doug commits fraud on Bob with the justification that “it is good to lie to get what you want,” then clearly it must also be good to be honest as well, since it is impossible to get what you want by lying unless other people are willing to assume your honesty. Thus the premise that it is good to lie to get what you want cannot be achieved unless other people act with integrity – thus lying and honesty are simultaneously required for the fulfillment of the moral principle. This cannot logically stand – that both an action and its complete opposite are simultaneously moral in the same place, for the same people, and at the same time.

This is how we know that fraud is wrong.

Again, knowing that fraud is “wrong” simply means that we know that any moral theory that justifies fraud is invalid, because it is self-contradictory. If we build a bridge, and the bridge falls down, we know that the bridge was “wrong” – but the most important thing that we can learn from this disaster is not that the bridge fell down, but to understand the flaws in the theory that caused us to build a bridge that fell down. Similarly, moral theories that cause disasters, such as communism, fascism and Nazism, are important to evaluate relative to UPB not only so we can understand how they went so wrong, but also how to fix our moral theories in the future. Since as a species, we will be forever building bridges, it is essential that we get our facts and theories right, or they will endlessly fall down around us.

However, the question remains whether fraud is evil, or just an aesthetically negative action (ANA).

Fraud is unusual compared to rape, theft and murder, insofar as it requires that the victim act positively to participate in the process. I can jump up behind you and strangle you without any participation on your part, but I cannot defraud you unless you participate to some degree.

Thus fraud falls under the umbrella of “avoidability,” and so is in a fundamentally different category than rape, murder and theft. However, the degree of avoidability partly determines the degree of immorality involved. Sending your bank information to a Nigerian email spammer is certainly avoidable; being cheated by an eBay business with a perfect rating is far less avoidable.

There may be certain situations under which fraud is unavoidable, such as “bartering” for a life-saving medicine when no alternative exists, but that falls under the “gray area” that we have discussed above – these occurrences are so rare that they are to ethics as mutations are to biological species.

The Fifth Test: Lying

The question of lying is interesting because telling the truth is generally considered to be universally preferable, but not enforceable through violence.

It is generally considered more of a strict requirement than “being on time,” but less strict than “stealing.”

What does the UPB framework have to say about this?

Naturally, any moral theory proposing “lying is good” immediately self-detonates, since if the man proposing it is lying – which is good – then lying is bad, because he’s told the truth that lying is bad.

For instance:

Bob: Lying is always good.

Doug: Are you lying?

Bob: Yes.

Doug: So lying must be bad, since you are lying about it being good.

Or:

Bob: Lying is always good.

Doug: Are you lying?

Bob: No.

Doug: Thus lying is not always good, since you are telling the truth about lying being good.

Lying, however, does not require the initiation of force, and so does not violate the possibility of avoidability. Since liars can be avoided, they cannot logically be aggressed against.

Lying also fits more closely in the category of violence, insofar as it is moral to lie in self-defense, just as it is moral to use violence in self-defense. It is hard to think of a situation where one would have to “be late” in self-defense, or “be rude.” However, if a man bursts into your house and demands to know where your beloved wife is so he can slap her around, it would seem a parody of integrity to refuse to lie to him. Lying in this case would be a form of third-party self-defense, and as morally acceptable as the use of violence in self-defense.

Similarly, if a man obtains a hundred dollars from us by lying, we may justly lie to him to get it back.

Thus we may justly lie to a liar, just as we may justly defend ourselves from a punch with a punch, but we would not exactly respect the escalating pettiness of “repaying” a tardy person by showing up even later.

The difference is that “being late” is not as actively destructive as lying. A tardy person is annoying, but does not fundamentally undermine your capacity to process reality. It’s one thing for me to show up an hour late for a 7am meeting – it’s quite another to attempt to convince you that we in fact scheduled the meeting for 8am, when I know that this was not the case.

Attacking your confidence in your own mind (sometimes called “gaslighting,” after the old movie) is far more egregious than merely making you wait, since it is the act of using another’s trust in you to undermine his trust in himself, which is highly corrupt, since it is using avalue to undermine a value, like counterfeiting.

This is how UPB validates the illogic of the proposition “lying is good,” and confirms that the act of lying to someone is worse than “being late,” but better than “assault.”

More Challenging Tests of UPB

We have now tested specific moral theories relative to the framework of UPB, and found that UPB validates our most commonly held moral beliefs, such as prohibitions against rape, murder and theft. By bringing the criterion of avoidability into our analysis, we have also helped differentiate between crimes that cannot be avoided, and crimes that must be enabled through positive action, such as fraud. Finally, we have divided “preferable behaviour” into three major categories – universal, aesthetic, and neutral (and their relevant opposites). Universally prohibited actions include rape, murder and theft, which force may be used to prevent. Aesthetically preferable actions include politeness, being on time and so on, which cannot be enforced through violence. Neutral actions include purely subjective preferences, or actions that have no moral content, such as running for a bus.

However, there remain many challenging moral tests that fall outside the examples we have dealt with above. We will only deal with a few of those here, to have a look at the framework of UPB, and see how it deals with these more challenging moral questions.

Self-Defense

The concept of self-defense should not be taken for granted. If we assume that there is no such thing as self-defense, or that self-defense is never a valid action, then the framework of UPB undoes that assumption very quickly.

If there is no such thing as self-defense, then we are not talking about the initiation or the retaliation of the use of force, but rather just the use of force in any context. In other words, if we get rid of the concept of self-defense, the only question that we need to ask ourselves is: is it universally preferable to use force, or not?

If it were universally preferable to use force, then no human being should ever advance a moral argument, but should rather use force to achieve his ends. However, just as in the rape, theft and murder examples cited above, the claim that it is universally preferable to use force immediately invalidates itself. To be able to use force upon another person requires that that person submit to force – in other words, in order for one person to be moral, the other person must be immoral, which cannot stand. Also, if the other person submits to force, it is not force – thus he must resist, which requires that he resist virtue in order to enable virtue, which is self-contradictory.

In addition, if it is always preferable to use force, then crimes such as rape and murder become irrelevant, because if it is always preferable to use force, then love-making becomes immoral, and rape becomes moral – but only for the rapist, while submission to violence, rather than violence itself, becomes moral for his victim, which is a contradiction.

If, on the other hand, we say that violence is bad, then we open up the possibility of self-defense. If it is a UPB-compliant statement to say that violence is evil, then we know that, since that which is evil can be prevented through the use of violence, the use of violence to oppose violence is morally valid.

Thus, since we know that violence is evil, we know that we may use force to oppose it. If we define an action as evil, but also prevent anybody from acting against it, then we are no longer moral philosophers, but merely judgemental archeologists. This would be akin to a medical theory that said that illness is bad, but that it is evil to attempt to prevent or cure it – which would make no sense whatsoever.

Also, if human beings cannot validly act to prevent harm to themselves, then actions such as inoculations, wearing gloves in the cold, putting on sunscreen or insect repellent, building a wall to prevent a landslide, brushing one’s teeth, wearing shoes and so on are all immoral actions.

If we return to Bob and Doug, and we give them the moral argument that self-defense is always wrong, what results?

Well, we create another paradox. Self-defense is the use of violence to prevent violence. If self-defense is always wrong, then it cannot be violently “inflicted” upon an attacker. However, preferences that cannot be inflicted upon others fall into the APA or morally neutral category. To place the violence of self-defense into these categories is to say that violence cannot be inflicted on others – but the very nature of violence is that it is inflicted on others, and thus this approach results in a surfeit of contradictions.

Self-defense cannot be “evil,” since evil by definition can be prevented through force. However, self-defense is a response to the initiation of force, and thus cannot be prevented through force, any more than you can stop the motion of a soccer ball by kicking it violently.

Self-defense also cannot be required behaviour, since required behaviour (“don’t rape”) can be enforced through violence, which would mean that anyone failing to violently defend himself could be legitimately aggressed against. However, someone failing to defend himself is already being aggressed against, and so we end up in a circular situation where everyone can legitimately act violently against a person who is not defending himself, which is not only illogical, but morally abhorrent.

If Bob attacks Doug, but it is completely wrong for Doug to use violence to defend himself, then violence ends up being placed into two moral categories – the initiation of force is morally good, but self-defense is morally evil, which cannot stand according to UPB.

However, you might argue, does not the proposition that self-defense is good also make violence both good and bad at the same time – the violence that is used to attack is bad, but the violence that is used for self-defense is good?

This is an interesting objection – however, if the initiation of force is evil, then it can be prohibited by using force, since that is one of the very definitions of evil that we worked out above.

Thus it is impossible for any logical moral theory to reject the moral validity of self-defense.

Child Raising

Instinctively, we generally understand that there is something quite wrong with parents who do not feed their babies. To conceive a child, carry a child to term, give birth to the child, and then leave it lying in its crib to starve to death, severely offends our sensibilities.

Of course, our offence is in no way a moral argument, but it is an excellent starting place to test a moral theory.

Before, when we were talking about UPB, we noted that, where there are exceptions in UPB, there must be objective differences in biology. Or, to put it more accurately, where there are objective differences in biology, there may be rational exceptions or differences in UPB. A child of five has a biologically immature brain and nervous system, and thus cannot rationally process the long-term consequences of his actions. It is the immature brain that is the key here, insofar as if an adult male is retarded to the point where his brain is the equivalent to that of a five year old, he would also have a reduced responsibility for his actions.

Thus when we point to situations of reduced responsibility, we are not taking away responsibility that exists, but rather recognizing a situation where responsibility does not exist, at least to some degree. If I say that a man in a wheelchair cannot take the escalator, I am not taking away his right to take the escalator, but merely pointing out that he cannot, in fact, use it. When I say that UPB does not apply to the actions of a five year old, I am not saying that UPB is subjective, any more than a height requirement for a roller coaster somehow makes the concept of “tall” subjective.

If I voluntarily enter into a contract with you wherein I promise to pay your bills for a year, I have not signed myself into slavery, but I certainly have taken on a positive obligation that I am now responsible for.

If I run a nursing home, and I take in patients who are unable to feed themselves, then if I do not feed those patients, I am responsible for their resulting deaths. No one is forcing me to take in these patients, but once I have expressed a desire and a willingness to take care of them, then I am responsible for their continued well-being.

In the same way, if I borrow your lawnmower, I am obligated to bring it back in more or less the same state that it was when I borrowed it. Similarly, if I go to a pet store and buy a dog, I have taken on a voluntary obligation to take care of that dog. This does not mean that I am now the dog’s slave until the day it dies, but it does mean that as long as the dog is in my possession, I have a responsibility to try to keep it healthy.

These kinds of implicit contracts are quite common in life. We do not sign a contract with a restaurateur when we go to eat a meal in his restaurant; it is simply understood that we will pay before we leave. I have never signed a contract when I walk into a store promising not to shoplift, but they have the right to prosecute me if I do. I also have never signed a contract promising not to rape a woman if we go on a date, yet such a “contract” certainly exists, according to UPB.

If I run a nursing home, and disabled people rely on me to feed them, if I prove unable to feed them for some reason, then my responsibility is clearly to find somebody else who will feed them. The grave danger is not that I don’t feed them, but rather that everyone else thinks that I am feeding them, and so do not provide them food. This accords with an old moral argument about diving into a river to save someone from drowning. I am not obligated to dive into a river to save someone from drowning, but the moment that I do – or state my intention openly – then I am responsible for trying to save that person, for the very practical reason that everyone else thinks that I am going to save that person, and so may not take direct action themselves.

Thus it is assumed that parents will feed and take care of their newborn baby. If said parents decide against such care-giving, then they are obligated to give the child up to other people who will care for it, or face the charge of murder, just as the manager of a home for the disabled must either feed those who utterly depend on him, or give them up to someone who will. If I decide that I no longer want to take care of my dog, I must find him another home, not simply let him starve to death.

This all relies on the principle of third-party self-defense, which is fully supported by the framework of UPB, since the right of self-defense is universal. If I see a man in a wheelchair being attacked by a woman, I have the right to defend him – and this is all the more true if he lacks the capacity to defend himself.

Since children cannot feed themselves, earn a living or live independently, they are the moral equivalent of kidnap victims, or the wife we talked about before whose husband locked her in the basement. Children also lack the capacity for effective self-defense, due to their small stature and near-complete dependence upon their parents.

Thus since it is certainly the case that we have the right to act in self-defense for someone else – and that right becomes even stronger if that person cannot act in his own self-defense, it is perfectly valid to use force against parents who do not feed their children, just as it is perfectly valid to use force against the husband who is starving his wife to death by locking her in the basement.

As we also mentioned above, the less able a victim is to avoid the situation, the worse the crime is. Even the wife who ends up locked in the basement has at least some ownership in the matter, because she chose to marry this evil lunatic to begin with. Once she is locked in the basement, the situation is unavoidable, yet there were doubtless many clues hinting at her husband’s abusive nature, from the day she first met him.

Children, however, are the ultimate victims, because they never had any chance to avoid the situations they find themselves in.

Thus we can logically establish the responsibility of parents towards their children by using the UPB framework. Since every person is responsible for the effects of his or her body, and children are an effect of the body, then parents are responsible for their children. Since everyone has the right to self-defense, for themselves and for others – since it is a universal right – then anyone can act to defend children. Since everyone must fulfill voluntary obligations, and having children is a voluntary obligation, parents must fulfill those obligations related to children. Since, through inaction, causing the death of someone completely dependent upon you is the equivalent of murder, parents are liable for such a crime.

We could of course put forward the proposition that parents do not have to take care of their children, but that is far too specific a principle to be a moral premise – it would be the same as saying “parents can murder,” which is not UPB-compliant, and so would require a biological differentiation to support an exception – and becoming a parent does not utterly overturn and reverse one’s biological nature.

Parents who starve a child to death are clearly guilty of murder. Children are born into this world in a state of involuntary imprisonment within the family – this does not mean that the family is evil, or corrupt – it is simply a statement of biological fact. Children are by the parents’ choice enslaved to the parents – this form of biological incarceration puts negligent parents in the same moral position as a kidnapper who allows his captive to starve to death, or a nurse who lets her utterly-dependent patients die of thirst.

“Don’t Eat Fish”

What would be the status of the moral proposition: “It is evil to eat fish”?

Clearly, this proposition seems to satisfy at least some of the requirements of UPB – it appears universal, independent of time and place, and relatively objective.

Yet it seems hard for us to reasonably call this a truly moral theory – why?

First of all, “evil” encompasses actions that can be prevented through the use of force. Rape is “evil,” and so I can use force to defend myself against someone attempting to rape me.

Can I justly shoot someone who eats a piece of fish?

It would seem silly to argue that I can – but why?

There are some objective limits to the universality of this doctrine. For instance, some people may have no access to fish – they may live in a desert, say – while others live by a lake teeming with fish, and find it hard or impossible to survive without eating them. However, that can’t be quite enough, since we have already accepted the fact that the inability of a eunuch to rape does not invalidate the moral proposition “it is evil to rape.”

No, the “red herring” in the moral proposition “It is evil to eat fish” is the word “fish.”

A scientist cannot validly say that his theory of gravity only applies to pink rocks. Since his theory involves gravity, it must apply to all entities that have mass.

Similarly, in the example above, UPB accepts only the act of eating, and rejects what is being eaten, since what is being eaten is not an action, but rather what is being acted upon.

In the same way, an ethicist cannot validly put forward the moral proposition: “It is evil to rape the elderly.” “Rape” is the behaviour; whether the victim is elderly or not is irrelevant to the moral proposition, since as long as the victim is human, the requirement for universality remains constant. “Thou shalt not steal” is a valid moral proposition according to UPB – “thou shalt not steal turnips” is not, for the simple reason that theft is related to the concept of property – and turnips, as a subset of property, cannot be rationally delineated from all other forms of property and assigned their own moral rule.

The moral proposition “eating fish is evil” thus fails the test of universality because it is too specific to be generalized – it is like saying “my theory of gravity applies only to pink rocks.” If it is a theory of gravity, then it must apply to everything; if it only applies to pink rocks, then it is not a theory of gravity.

UPB also rejects as invalid any theory that results in opposing moral judgments for identical actions. “Assault” cannot be moral one day, and immoral the next. Thus we know that “eating” cannot be moral one day, and immoral the next.

Either “eating” is moral, immoral, or morally neutral. If eating is immoral, then a whole host of logical problems arise, which I am sure we are quite familiar with by now.

If, on the other hand, eating is moral, then it cannot be moral to eat a cabbage, and immoral to eat a fish, since that is a violation of universality, insofar as the same action – eating – is judged both good and bad.

It is in this way that we understand that the proposition “eating fish is evil” fails the test of UPB, and is not valid as a moral theory.

Animal Rights

We do not have the time here to go into a full discussion of the question of animal rights, but we can at least deal with the moral proposition: “it is evil to kill fish.”

If it is evil to kill fish, then UPB says that anyone or anything that kills the fish is evil. This would include not just fishermen, but sharks as well – since if killing fish is evil, we have expanded our definition of ethical “actors” to include non-human life.

It is clear that sharks do not have the capacity to refrain from killing fish, since they are basically eating machines with fins.

Thus we end up with the logical problem of “inevitable evil.” If it is evil to kill fish, but sharks cannot avoid killing fish, then sharks are “inevitably evil.” However, as we have discussed above, where there is no choice – where avoidability is impossible – there can be no morality. Thus the proposition “it is evil to kill fish” attempts to define a universal morality that includes non-moral situations, which cannot stand logically.

Also, the word “fish” remains problematic in the formulation, since it is too specific to be universal. The proper UPB reformulation is: “it is evil for people to kill living organisms.”

If, however, it is evil to kill, we again face the problem of “inevitable evil.” No human being can exist without killing other organisms such as viruses, plants, or perhaps animals. Thus “human life” is defined as “evil.” But if human life is defined as evil, then it cannot be evil, since avoidance becomes impossible.

What if we say: “it is evil to kill people” – would that make a man-eating shark evil?

No – once again, since sharks have no capacity to avoid killing people, they cannot be held responsible for such actions, any more than a landslide can be taken to court if it kills a man.

UPB allows for exceptions based on objective and universal material or biological differences, just as other sciences do. The scientific theory that gases expand when heated applies, of course, only to gases. I cannot invalidate the theory by proving that it does not apply to, say, plastic.

In the same way, morality only applies to rational consciousness, due to the requirement for avoidability. If I attempt to apply a moral theory to a snail, a tree, a rock, or the concept “numbers,” I am attempting to equate rational consciousness with entities that may be neither rational nor conscious, which is a logical contradiction. I might as well say that the Opposite Angle Theorem in geometry is invalid because it does not apply to a circle, or a cloud. The OAT only applies to intersecting lines – attempting to apply it to other situations is the conceptual equivalent of attempting to paint air.

In other words, misapplication is not disproof.

There are many other “gray areas” that we could work on, from abortion to intellectual property rights to restitution and so on, but I think that it is far more important to take UPB out of the realm of abstraction, and begin applying it to the real world problems we face today.

Part 3: Practice

The Value of Universally Preferable Behaviour

A new theory is of precious little value if it only points out the obvious. If physics only provided an accurate description of how we catch a ball, then physics would not be a very worthwhile pursuit, because we already can catch a ball. Discovering that the world is round only aids in long-distance navigation across the sea – it does nothing to help us get downtown. Quantum mechanics only becomes useful when other methodologies cannot provide the necessary accuracy – it does not help in building a car.

In the same way, the UPB framework, and the moral rules that it validates or rejects, should ideally provide us with some startling insights about the world that we live in, and our relations to each other.

If all that UPB did was to prove that rape, murder and theft are morally wrong, it would not add much value, since almost no one believes that those things are morally right to begin with.

Thus let us begin applying this framework to the world that we live in, and see what value comes out of it.

The “Null Zone” Revisited

At the beginning of this book, I put forward a way of looking at how we process truth, analogizing it to physics. From the “little truths” of catching a baseball, we arrive at the “great truths” of physics – and the great truths cannot contradict the little truths.

The same is true of morality. From the little truths of “I should not murder” we can get to the great truths such as “the initiation of the use of force is morally wrong.”

In the realm of physics, a central barrier to the logical extrapolation of truths from personal experience to universal theory has been religion.

For instance, no man has ever directly experienced a perfect circle – such an entity exists in the abstract, and in mathematics, but neither can be visualized in the mind, nor sensually experienced in the real world. Nowhere in nature, to our knowledge, does a perfect circle exist, either in the “little truths” of personal experience, or the “great truths” of physics.

However, for thousands of years, the science of astronomy was crippled by the quest for this “perfect circle.” Planetary orbits had to be perfect circles, because God would never allow anything as “imperfect” as an ellipse in His creation.

The problem with this approach – well, one problem anyway – was the retrograde motion of Mars. From our planet, Mars at times appears to be moving “backwards,” as Earth “overtakes” it around the sun. The false belief that the Earth was the centre of the solar system, combined with a mania for “perfect” circles, produced the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, which multiplied all of these perfect circles to the point of absurdity, in order to take into account elliptical orbits and the retrograde motion of Mars.

Why was this illusion of perfection considered to be a requirement for celestial bodies? Certainly the evidence of the moon, with its pitted and cratered surface, would seem to support the imperfection of the heavens, but religious fixations bypassed the direct sensual evidence of both immediate and interplanetary imperfections. Galileo’s discoveries of moon-mountains, sunspots and Jupiter’s moons were all attacked as heretical.

We can also turn this analysis to the question of the existence of God as well.

We have no direct, empirical or rational evidence for the existence of God. The most abstract scientific measurements provide no evidence for the existence of God either – yet in between the truth of our own experience, which is that there is no God, and the most abstract scientific measurements and theories – which also confirm that there is no God – a sort of “null zone” is willed into existence, which completely inverts any rational standards of truth.

Bigotry

Beliefs may be true, false, or anti-truth. It is a true belief that the Sahara Desert is in North Africa; it is a false belief that the Sahara is in Scotland; it is an anti-true belief that the Sahara is whatever I want it to be, and exists wherever I want it to exist. The first belief is true; the second is false – the third is a bigoted assertion that detonates the very concept of proof.

We can say:

1. Proposition X is true because it is rational.
2. Proposition Y is false because it is irrational.
3. Proposition Z is true because I want it to be true.

The third assertion is a complete self-contradiction. “Truth” is independent of desire, since desire is by definition a subjective preference, and truth is by definition the conformity of ideas to the objective standards of logic and empirical reality. Saying that something is true because you want it to be true is to equate subjectivity with objectivity, which is a self-contradictory statement.

Bigoted assertions – or “faith” – by definition cannot be tested, since they are not belief in the absence of evidence, but belief in defiance of reason and/or evidence.

We can believe unproven things that turn out to be true – someone doubtless thought that the world was round before it was proven – but the “null zone” is the realm wherein we cling to a belief in things that could not possibly turn out to be true.

If I say that two plus two equals five, I am making a mistake that can be corrected with reference to logic. If I say that I believe that a square circle exists, then I am making an explicitly self-contradictory statement, which disproves itself. If I go further, however, and emphatically claim that “foo plus tury equals desty” – and refuse to define any of my terms – I am making a statement to which logic and evidence cannot be applied.

Next Stop: the “Alternate Universe”

In general, the way that people try to “save” their anti-empirical and anti-logical beliefs is to create an “alternate realm” or “alternate universe” wherein their self-contradictory statements can somehow be true.

If I say: “A square circle exists,” I am asserting that which is clearly impossible within this universe. Thus, if I wish to retain my belief, I must invent some other universe, or realm “outside” this universe where a square circle can exist.

If I make up a realm where self-contradiction equals truth, I can then claim that those who say that a square circle does not exist are themselves bigoted and prejudicial, because they are eliminating possibilities that could be true. (This inevitably ends up with comparisons to those who said that Einsteinian physics was impossible, that the world could not be round and so on. Uncertainty in content – i.e. theory – is somehow supposed to be equated with uncertainty in methodology, i.e. reason and evidence. The fact that a mathematical theorem can be disproved does not disprove the principles of mathematics, but rather confirms them.)

With regards to this “null zone,” only two possibilities really exist. Either this null zone exists completely independently of our universe, and will never be measurable, detectable or discoverable in any way, shape or form – or, at some point, we shall be able to detect and interact with this magical land where self-contradiction equals truth.

If, at some point, it turns out that we are able to interact with this null zone, then we shall have direct sensual or rational evidence of its existence. In other words, it must “protrude” into our universe in some manner. However, the moment that it becomes detectable in our universe, it must have rational and empirical existence, like everything else we can detect. Thus these otherworldly “protrusions” into our universe cannot create the capacity for our universe to support the existence of a square circle.

We can thus be certain that if we are ever able to detect this other universe, the evidence we gather will in no way support the existence of self-contradictory statements. Square circles, gods and other self-contradictory concepts cannot hide there, any more than they can hide in the wet dreams of leprechauns.

On the other hand, if it turns out that we are never able to detect this other universe, and it remains a completely theoretical entity, with no evidence or rationality to support it, then it is simply a conceptual bag in which it is “convenient” to place things that are obviously not true.

Existence versus Non-Existence

We define “non-existence” as that which does not possess mass or energy, or display the effects of mass or energy, such as detectable relationships like gravity.

God does not possess mass or energy, or display the effects of mass or energy – God in fact is not detectable or verifiable in any way, shape or form, either through the senses, or through rationality.

Thus if I say, “God exists,” what I am really saying is:

“That which exists must be detectable; God cannot be detectable, but God exists – therefore that which does not exist, exists.”

In other words, by saying “God exists,” I have created an insurmountable contradiction. I have defined “existence” as “non-existence,” which makes about as much sense as defining “life” as “inanimate matter,” or a rock as “the opposite of a rock,” or a “square” as a “circle.”

Similarly, if I create some alternate universe where “non-existence equals existence” and “contradiction equals consistency” and “truth equals falsehood” and “irrationality equals rationality,” then what I have really done is create a realm called “error,” put everything in it which is not true, and defined this realm as a place where “error equals truth.”

(Let’s not even get started on the logical nightmare of the truth value contained in the statement “error equals truth.”)

Of course, people do not create this “alternate universe” in order to invalidate truth within our own universe, but rather to rescue that which is erroneous in reality, and call it true. For instance, no one who argues “God may exist in another universe, so you cannot claim that God does not exist” ever argues “I may not exist in that other universe, so you cannot claim that I exist here.”

They also tend not to respond well to the argument that: “In another universe, you may be agreeing with me that God does not exist, so that makes you an atheist.” (This argument tends also not to work very well with math teachers – I have never seen a student successfully argue that an incorrect answer may be correct in another universe, and so it is unjust to mark it as wrong.)

If valid statements about reality can be endlessly opposed because some imaginary realm called “error equals truth” invalidates them, then what is really being said is “no positive statements about truth can be valid” – however, we are wise enough as philosophers by now to know that this very statement is self-contradictory, since it is a positive statement considered to be true that says that no positive statements can be true.

If nothing can be true or false – even that statement – then no statements whatsoever can be made about anything. Using words, using English, using comprehensible sentences – all make no sense whatsoever, since in this “alternative universe” such structured utterances may be complete nonsense. If things which can be true in this alternate universe have an effect on statements we make in this universe, then clearly the reverse is also true, which means that no statements can ever be made about anything, since their exact opposite can be equally true.

The true reality of the statement “error equals truth” is the tautological insanity of “null equals null.”

The “Alternate Universe” in Human Society

The reason that we have been spending so much time dealing with this “alternate universe” theory is that it has direct relevance to human society, and is used to “justify” the greatest evils which are committed among us.

In our own personal experience, we know that murder is wrong. In working through the proposition that murder is morally wrong in the above examples, I strongly doubt that anyone was shocked to have their moral instincts confirmed through the strict abstract reasoning of UPB.

In this section, however, it is officially permissible for you to begin to be truly shocked.

The greatest leaps forward in scientific understanding are the so-called “unifying theories.” Einstein spent decades trying to work out a unified field theory; and theories of physics which unite strong and weak forces, electromagnetism, gravity and so on remain elusive.

UPB as a framework, however, not only justifies our moral instincts at the personal, philosophical and universal levels – but also has profound and shocking implications for human society.

UPB In Action

The UPB framework validates moral propositions by demanding that they be internally consistent, and universal in terms of time, place and individuals.

If we accept UPB, we must also accept the following corollary:

• Moral propositions are independent of costume.

What this means is that a man cannot change his moral nature along with his clothing. The act of changing one’s costume does not alter one’s fundamental nature. Thus opposing moral rules cannot be valid based on the clothes one is wearing.

Soldiers, of course, wear costumes that are different from the average citizen. The average citizen is forbidden to murder; soldiers, however, are not only allowed to murder, but are morally praised for murdering.

Let’s take another example.

Theft is morally wrong, as we have seen above. It is morally wrong for all people in all situations at all times and under all circumstances.

Since theft is the forcible removal of somebody else’s property without consent, then taxation is always, universally and forever a moral evil. Taxation is by definition the forcible removal of somebody’s property without their consent, since taxation relies on the initiation of the use of force to strip a man of his property.

What we call “the government” is merely another example of this null zone wherein up is down, black is white, truth is falsehood and evil is good.

Society progresses exactly to the degree that reason and evidence make the great leap from the personal to the universal, and destroy any irrational null zones in the way. Science progresses exactly to the degree that it rejects the irrationality of God and subjective “absolutes.” Medicine progresses exactly to the degree that it rejects the efficacy of prayer and empty ritual, and instead relies on reason and evidence.

Philosophy also – and human society in general – will advance exactly to the degree that it rejects the irrational “square-circle morality” of statist and religious ethical theories.

Government

Saying that the government operates under opposite moral rules from the rest of society is exactly the same as saying, “leprechauns are immune to gravity.” First of all, leprechauns do not exist – and one of the ways in which we know that they do not exist is that it is claimed that they are immune to gravity. Everything that has mass is subject to gravity – that which is immune to gravity by definition does not have mass, and therefore does not exist. The statement “leprechauns are immune to gravity” is a tautology, which only confirms the nonexistence of leprechauns – it is the semantic equivalent of “that which does not exist, does not exist.” A is A, Aristotle’s first law of logic, does precious little to confirm the existence of that which is defined as non-existence.

In the same way, when we say that it is morally good for soldiers to murder and government representatives to steal, we know that “soldiers” and “government representatives” as moral categories are completely invalid.

If I say that a square circle has the right to steal, I am merely saying that that which cannot exist has the right to do that which is self-contradictory – a purely nonsensical statement, but one which remains strangely compelling in the “null zone” of politics.

If I buy a soldier’s costume at a second hand store, and put it on, clearly I have not created an alternative universe wherein opposite moral rules can be valid. The moment before I put the costume on, it was wrong for me to murder – when does it become right for me to murder? When I put on the trousers? What if I have the trousers on, but not the vest? What if I have only one boot on? What about if both boots are on, but only one is laced? What if my hat is on backwards? What if I have put on a uniform that is not recognized by the first person I come across? Did the Beatles suddenly possess the right to murder when they shot the cover for “Sergeant Peppers”? Did they lose that right when they took off their jackets?

I ask these rhetorical questions because they are in fact deadly serious. Clearly, a military costume does not change the nature of a human being, any more than a haircut turns him into a duck, a concept, or a god.

“Ah,” you may say, “but the costume is invalid because you got it at a second hand store – putting on the uniform of the soldier no more makes you a soldier than photocopying a doctorate gives you a Ph.D.”

The analogy is incorrect, because having a Ph.D. or photocopying a doctorate does not change any of the moral rules that you are subjected to as a human being.

“Well,” you may reply, “but the difference is that the soldier possesses moral rights that are provided to him by the average citizen, for the sake of collective self-defense and so on.”

This raises a very interesting point, which is the question of whether opinions can change reality.

Opinions and Reality

Clearly, we understand that I cannot through my opinion release you from the restraints of gravity, any more than my opinion that “2+2=5” makes it true.

“Opinions” are those beliefs which have no clear evidence in reality, or for which no clear evidence can be provided, or which are expressions of merely personal preferences. My personal opinion is that I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla – I may also have an “opinion” that Iceland is a tropical paradise, or that God exists, or that rain falls upward. Personal opinions clearly have nothing to do with morality; opinions that claim to accurately describe reality, but which do not, are merely incorrect prejudices. Believing that the rain falls upward does not reverse its course; wearing a Hawaiian shirt to Iceland does not make Reykjavik any warmer.

Thus believing that murder is morally good does not make murder morally good. Since my beliefs about a human being do not change his moral nature, my belief that his murders are virtuous does not change the virtue of his actions. If I close my eyes and imagine that you are a lizard, you do not suddenly lose your ability to regulate your own body temperature. Imagining that you are a fish does not bypass your need for scuba gear.

Opinions do not change reality.

Because opinions do not change reality, I cannot grant you any exception or reversal with regards to a universal moral rule. Since moral rules are based on universal logic, as well as the physical nature and reality of a human being, I cannot grant you the “right to murder,” any more than I can grant you the ability to levitate, walk on water or accurately say that two and two make five.

Government as Voluntarism

The open force involved in the institution of government – the conceptual wrapper that reverses moral rules for a particular group of individuals – is something that is always kept off the table in debates. When talking about government, it is never considered a positive thing to point out “the gun in the room.” Almost by definition, governments are considered to be chosen by and for the people, and to operate with their expressed or implicit approval.

However, this is pure nonsense.

If a man holds a knife to a woman’s throat while having sex with her, that is by any definition an act of rape. He cannot say that the sex is consensual, while at the same time threatening her with injury or death if she refuses to have sex with him. If the sex is voluntary, then the knife is completely unnecessary. If the man feels the need for a knife, then clearly the sex is not voluntary.

In the same way, people say that taxation is part of the social contract that they have voluntarily agreed to.

This is both logically and empirically false.

We know that it is empirically false because no social contract exists. Neither you nor I ever signed a document voluntarily consenting to the income tax – we were simply born into a system that takes our money from us at the point of a gun.

The Gun in the Room

Many people will argue at this point that taxation is not enforced at the point of a gun, but rather that people pay it voluntarily. For instance, I have never had a gun pointed in my face by a tax collector or a policeman, but I have paid taxes for decades.

This may be true, but it is completely irrelevant. If I tell a woman that I will kill her children if she does not have sex with me, and she submits herself to me, we clearly understand that an immoral action has taken place – even though I have used no weapon in my violation. Clearly, if the woman submits to me, it is because she fears that I will carry out my threat. If I told her that my pet leprechaun will kill her children if she does not have sex with me, she would very likely be disturbed, but would not fear my threat in any significant way, since it is impossible for my pet leprechaun to kill her children. Or, if I died, and my will stated that I would kill this woman’s children if she did not have sex with me, clearly she would feel relieved rather than afraid, since I cannot conceivably act out my threat from beyond the grave.

Thus we pay taxes because we know that if we do not, the likelihood of being aggressed against by representatives of the state is very high. If I do not pay my taxes, I will get a letter, then another letter, then a phone call, then a summons to court – and if I do not appear in court, or do not pay my back taxes and accumulated fines and interest, policemen will come with guns to take me to jail. If I resist those policemen, they will shoot me down.

To say that force equals voluntarism is completely illogical and self-contradictory. To say that the initiation of the use of force is completely equal to the non-initiation of the use of force is to say that up is down, black is white, and truth is falsehood.

Without the “null zone,” these corrupt fictions cannot be sustained.

The “null zone” is the lair of the beast we hunt.

As we can see, we know that personally it is wrong to steal; we have very few problems with an abstract and logical ban on theft, such as we have worked out above – yet still, there exists this “null zone” or alternate universe where such oppositions can be accepted without any question or concern.

According to UPB, it is wrong for me and you to steal. Yet somehow, in this “null zone,” it is not only allowed, but also perfectly moral, for others to steal. We must not steal – they must steal. It is moral madness!

Policemen

Let us take our good friend Bob away from his little room of moral theory testing and restore him to his original job as a policeman.

Clearly, when Bob wakes up in the morning, before his shift, he cannot go to his neighbour’s house and demand money at the point of a gun, no matter who tells him that it’s all right.

When Bob has his breakfast, he also cannot attack his neighbour and take his money. On his drive to work – even though he has put on his uniform – he has not punched in yet, and thus has no more rights than any other citizen. When he punches in, however, now, as if there descends an amoral pillar of fire from the very heavens, he gains the amazing ability to morally attack his neighbours and take their money.

Strangely, this is the only characteristic of his that has utterly reversed itself. He cannot fly, he cannot change his shape, he cannot successfully digest ball bearings or live in an inferno; he cannot run 1,000 miles an hour, and neither can he walk through a brick wall. He is absolutely, utterly, and completely the same man as he was before he punched in – yet now, he is subject to completely opposite moral rules.

Even more strangely, if I am not a “policeman,” but I follow Bob to work, and do exactly what he does – I put on a costume, walk into the police station, and put a piece of cardboard into a punch clock – why, if I then do exactly what Bob does, I am completely and totally immoral, although Bob’s identical actions are completely and totally moral.

What kind of sense does this make? How can we conceivably unravel this impenetrable mystery?

The simple fact is that it cannot be unravelled, because it is completely deranged. The fact that this “opposite world” moral madness is completely irrational – not to mention violently exploitive – is so obvious that it must be buried in an endless cavalcade of mythological “voluntarism.”

We are told that we “want” Bob to take our money – which completely contradicts the fact that Bob shows up on our doorstep pointing a loaded gun in our face. By this logic, I can also go up and down the street stealing money from my neighbours, and then claim to be utterly shocked when I am arrested:

“They want me to take their money!”

“But then why were you threatening to shoot them if they did not give you their money?”

“Because they owe me their money!”

“I thought you said that they want to give you their money.”

“No, no – they owe me. It’s really my money!”

“On what grounds do they owe you this money?”

“We have a contract!”

“Can you show me this contract? Have they signed this contract of their own free will?”

“It’s not that kind of contract! It’s a – social contract… And besides – according to that social contract, I own the whole street anyway – the whole damn neighbourhood in fact! Anyone who refuses to pay me my money can move somewhere else – I’m not forcing anyone!”

“And how do you know that you own the whole neighbourhood? Do you have ownership papers?”

“Yes, of course – have a look here!”

“Well, this is just a handwritten note saying that you own the whole neighbourhood – and it’s the same handwriting as your signature. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to book you – this is just a made-up contract with yourself, which you are inflicting on other people at the point of a gun.”

This is as completely insane and corrupt as me continuing to tell a woman I am raping that she wants to have sex with me. Can you imagine if I were on trial for rape, and there was a videotape of the woman begging me to stop, and I had a knife to her throat, how my defense would be received if I continued to insist that she actually wanted to have sex with me?

In court, I would be reviled, and thrown into jail for my obvious, mad, corrupt and self-serving hypocrisy.

Ah, but in the “null zone” of government, rape is lovemaking, kidnapping is invitation, rejecting theft is evil selfishness, and coercion is kindness.

This is what I mean when I say that this “opposite world null zone” is the most fundamental barrier to human happiness the world over. Stealing is wrong for us; stealing is wrong in the abstract – but stealing is somehow “right” in this insane alternate universe called “government”?

Practicality

Once the violence of government is intellectually exposed – and the supposed “voluntarism” of citizens is revealed as a vicious fraud – the argument always comes back that we need government to supply us with public goods such as protection, regional defense, roads etc.

I have written dozens of articles exposing the falsehood of this position, so I will not bother to reiterate those arguments here, since they are not essential to a book on morality, but rather would be more appropriate to a book explaining the principles and practicalities of a voluntary society. (You can read these articles on my blog at www.freedomain.blogspot.com. You can also visit www.freedomain.com as well, where you can download hundreds of free podcasts addressing a wide variety of these topics.)

The “argument from practicality” in no way solves the problem of violence. If I see you eating cheeseburgers every day, I can tell you that it is impractical for you to do so, if you want to maintain a healthy weight. I cannot claim that it is evil for you to eat cheeseburgers, for reasons that we have gone into already. I cannot justly compel you through force to increase the “practicality” of your actions.

Thus saying that the government is justified in forcing us to become more “practical” is completely false, which is verified by the UPB framework – even if we assume that government solutions are more “practical,” which in fact they are not.

Also, if government representatives claim that a social contract allows them to force an “impractical” population to behave more “practically,” an insurmountable contradiction is created.

If I force a woman to marry a man I have chosen for her, then clearly I believe that I have infinitely better judgment about the suitability of a husband for her than she does. In fact, I do not believe that she is open to reason at all, or has any clue about her own self-interest, because I am taking no account of her preferences, but am forcing her to marry a man of my choosing.

When I force this woman to get married, I can only justify the use of force – even on immediate, pragmatic grounds – by claiming that she is mentally unfit to make her own choices with regards to marriage.

If the woman is mentally unfit to make her own choices with regards to marriage, then clearly she is also mentally unfit to delegate a representative to make that choice for her. If she has no idea what constitutes a good or suitable husband, then how can she evaluate me as fit to decide who will be a good or suitable husband for her?

If a man of extraordinarily low intelligence does not understand the concept of “health,” would it be reasonable to expect him to be rational in his choice of a doctor? In order to competently choose a doctor, we must understand the concepts of health, efficacy, cost, professionalism and so on.

In the same way, if I do not allow a woman to have any say in who she marries, then clearly I must believe that she has no understanding of what makes a good husband – but if she has no understanding of what makes a good husband, then she has no capacity to transfer that choice to me, since she will have no way of evaluating my criteria for what makes a good husband.

If I cannot decide what color to paint my house, and my solution is to sign a contract with a painter allowing him to choose the color for me – and in that contract I sign away all my future freedoms to resist his decisions, and give him the right to kidnap and enslave me if I disagree with any of his decisions, or refuse to pay for them – then clearly I am not of sound mind. If I give someone the power to compel me for the rest of my life, then clearly I do not believe that I am competent to make my own decisions.

If I do not think that I am competent to make my own decisions, then clearly my decision to subject myself to violence for the rest of my life is an incompetent decision.

Either I am capable of making competent decisions, or I am not. If I am capable of making competent decisions, then subjecting myself to force for the rest of my life is invalid. If I am not capable of making competent decisions, then my decision to subject myself to force for the rest of my life is also invalid.

Even if the above considerations are somehow bypassed, however, it is still impossible to justly enforce a social contract through a government.

Clearly, I cannot sign a contract on your behalf, or on my children’s behalf, which will be binding upon you or them for the rest of time. I cannot buy a car, send you the bill, and justly demand that you pay it. If I claim the power to impose unilateral contracts on you, UPB also grants you this power, and so you will just return the contract to me in my name.

In the same way, even if I choose to pay my taxes voluntarily, I cannot justly impose that choice upon you, since a voluntary contract is a merely personal preference, and so cannot be universally enforced through violence.

The Necessity of the State?

This whole question becomes even more ludicrous when we look at the most common moral “justification” for the power of democratic governments, which is based upon the “will of the majority.”

First of all, “will” is an aspect of the individual, while “majority” is a conceptual tag for a group. The “majority” can no more have a “will” than a “chorus line” can “give birth.” If you doubt this, just try building a tree house with the concept “forest” rather than with any individual pieces of wood.

Two additional objections constantly recur whenever the question of the necessity of a government arises. The first is that a free society is only possible if people are perfectly good or rational – in other words, that citizens need a centralized government because there are evil people in the world.

The first and most obvious problem with this position is that if evil people exist in society, they will also exist within the government – and be far more dangerous thereby. Citizens can protect themselves against evil individuals, but stand no chance against an aggressive government armed to the teeth with police and military might. Thus the argument that we need the government because evil people exist is false. If evil people exist, the government must be dismantled, since evil people will be drawn to use its power for their own ends – and, unlike private thugs, evil people in government have the police and military to inflict their whims on a helpless (and relatively disarmed) population.

Thus the argument is akin to the idea that “counterfeiters are very dangerous, so we should provide an exclusive monopoly over counterfeiting to a small group of individuals.” Where on earth do people think the counterfeiters will go first? (See: Federal Reserve.)

Logically, there are four possibilities as to the mixture of good and evil people in the world:

1. All men are moral.
2. All men are immoral.
3. The majority of men are immoral, and a minority moral.
4. The majority of men are moral, and a minority immoral.

(A perfect balance of good and evil is practically impossible.)

In the first case (all men are moral), the government is obviously not needed, since evil cannot exist.

In the second case (all men are immoral), the government cannot be permitted to exist for one simple reason. The government, it is generally argued, must exist because there are evil people in the world who desire to inflict harm, and who can only be restrained through fear of government retribution (police, prisons et al). A corollary of this argument is that the less retribution these people fear, the more evil they will do.

However, the government itself is not subject to any force or retribution, but is a law unto itself. Even in Western democracies, how many policemen and politicians go to jail?

Thus if evil people wish to do harm, but are only restrained by force, then society can never permit a government to exist, because evil people will work feverishly to grab control of that government, in order to do evil and avoid retribution. In a society of pure evil, then, the only hope for stability would be a state of nature, where a general arming and fear of retribution would blunt the evil intents of disparate groups. As is the case between nuclear-armed nations, a “balance of power” breeds peace.

The third possibility is that most people are evil, and only a few are good. If that is the case, then the government also cannot be permitted to exist, since the majority of those in control of the government will be evil, and will rule despotically over the good minority. Democracy in particular cannot be permitted, since the minority of good people would be subjugated to the democratic control of the evil majority. Evil people, who wish to do harm without fear of retribution, would inevitably control the government, and use its power to do evil free of the fear of consequences.

Good people do not act morally because they fear retribution, but because they love virtue and peace of mind – and thus, unlike evil people, they have little to gain by controlling the government. In this scenario, then, the government will inevitably be controlled by a majority of evil people who will rule over all, to the detriment of all moral people.

The fourth option is that most people are good, and only a few are evil. This possibility is subject to the same problems outlined above, notably that evil people will always want to gain control over the government, in order to shield themselves from just retaliation for their crimes. This option only changes the appearance of democracy: because the majority of people are good, evil power-seekers must lie to them in order to gain power, and then, after achieving public office, will immediately break faith and pursue their own corrupt agendas, enforcing their wills through the police and the military. (This is the current situation in democracies, of course.) Thus the government remains the greatest prize to the most evil men, who will quickly gain control over its awesome power – to the detriment of all good souls – and so the government cannot be permitted to exist in this scenario either.

It is clear, then, that there is no situation under which a government can logically or morally be allowed to exist. The only possible justification for the existence of a government would be if the majority of men are evil, but all the power of the government is always controlled by a minority of good men (see Plato’s Republic).

This situation, while interesting theoretically, breaks down logically because:

1. The evil majority would quickly outvote the minority or overpower them through a coup;
2. There is no way to ensure that only good people would always run the government; and,
3. There is absolutely no example of this having ever occurred in any of the brutal annals of state history.

The logical error always made in the defense of the government is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of people are evil, then at least 50% of people ruling over them are also evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of a government.

If there is no evil, governments are unnecessary. If evil exists, the governments are far too dangerous to be allowed to exist.

Why is this error so prevalent?

There are a number of reasons, which can only be touched on here. The first is that the government introduces itself to children in the form of public school teachers who are considered moral authorities. Thus are morality and authority first associated with the government – an association that is then reinforced through years of grinding repetition.

The second is that the government never teaches children about the root of its power – violence – but instead pretends that it is just another social institution, like a business or a church or a charity, but more moral.

The third is that the prevalence of religion and propaganda has always blinded men to the evils of the government – which is why rulers have always been so interested in furthering the interests of churches and state “education.” In the religious world-view, absolute power is synonymous with perfect virtue, in the form of a deity. In the real political world of men, however, increasing power always means increasing evil. With religion, also, all that happens must be for the good – thus, fighting encroaching political power is fighting the will of the deity. There are many more reasons, of course, but these are among the deepest. (For a more detailed discussion of the role that parents play in inculcating the fantasy that “power equals virtue,” please see my book “On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion.”)

At the beginning of this section, I mentioned that people generally make two errors when confronted with the idea of dissolving the government. The first is the belief that governments are necessary because evil people exist. The second is the belief that, in the absence of governments, any social institutions that arise will inevitably take the place of governments. Thus, Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs), insurance companies and private security forces are all considered potential cancers that will swell and overwhelm the body politic.

This view arises from the same error outlined above. If all social institutions are constantly trying to grow in power and enforce their wills on others, then by that very argument a centralized government cannot be allowed to exist. If it is an iron law that groups always try to gain power over other groups and individuals, then that power-lust will not end if one of them wins, but will continue to spread across society virtually unopposed until slavery is the norm.

The only way that social institutions can grow into violent monopolies is to offload the costs of enforcement onto their victims. Governments grow endlessly because they can pay tax collectors with a portion of the taxes they collect. The slaves are thus forced to pay for the costs of their enslavement.

In a voluntary society, there would be no taxation, and thus any group wishing to gain monopolistic power would have to fund its army itself, which would never be economically feasible or profitable. (For more details, please see my article “War, Profit and the State” at www.freedomain.blogspot.com.)

It is very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that already has overpowered us. It is similar to the statist argument about private monopolies – that citizens should create a governmental monopoly because they are afraid of private monopolies. It does not take keen vision to see through such nonsense.

What is the evidence for the view that decentralized and competing powers promotes peace? In other words, are there any facts that we can draw on to support the idea that a balance of power is the only chance that the individual has for freedom?

Organized crime does not provide many good examples, since gangs so regularly corrupt, manipulate and use the power of the government police to enforce their rule, and so such gangs cannot be said to be operating in a state of nature. Also, criminal gangs profit enormously by supplying legally-banned substances or services, and so also flourish largely due to state policies.

A more useful example is the fact that no leader has ever declared war on another leader who possesses nuclear weapons. In the past, when leaders felt themselves immune from personal retaliation, they were more than willing to kill off their own populations by waging war. Now that they are themselves subject to annihilation, they are only willing to attack countries that cannot fight back.

This is an instructive lesson on why such men require disarmed and dependent populations – and a good example of how the fear of reprisal inherent in a balanced system of decentralized and competing powers is the only proven method of securing and maintaining personal liberty.

Fleeing from imaginary devils into the protective prisons of governments only ensures the destruction of the very liberties that make life worth living.

Governments and Religion

The idea that being born creates a contract with a fictional agency, which in practical terms makes you a quasi-slave to specific individuals, is common to both religion and the state – and one other, far more personal agency, which I talk about in my first book “On Truth: The Tyranny Of Illusion.”

Whenever a priest says: “Obey God,” what he is really saying is: “Obey me.” Since God does not exist, any commandment that the priest claims is coming from God, is actually coming from the priest. “God” is just the fictional entity used to bully you conceptually in order to obtain your very practical subservience in the real world, to real individuals, in terms of voluntarily handing over money, time and resources.

It is far more efficient for exploiters to have their slaves consider slavery a virtue, since it cuts down enormously on the costs of controlling them. If I can convince you that it is evil to avoid serving me, and virtuous to be my slave, then I do not need to hire nearly as many thugs to bully, control and steal from you.

Religious and state mythologies, then, are fictions that vastly reduce the costs of controlling populations; they are the lubricant and fuel for the ghastly machinery of institutionalized violence.

Throughout the world, rulers are a very small percentage of the population. How can it be possible for 1-2% of people to control everybody else? There is a certain monopoly on armaments, to be sure, but that monopoly is relatively easy to counter, since most governments make a fortune selling weapons throughout the world.

The sad reality is that people as a whole are enslaved to fictional entities such as nations, gods, cultures – and governments.

Our personal pride would instinctively rebel against a immediate and enforced slavery to another human being – however, we seem to almost revel in slavery to mythology.

Our desire to be good – combined with the thrill of virtue that we get by obeying moral mythologies – has us lining up to willingly hand our resources over to those who claim to represent these mythologies.

One central reason that we know that governments and gods are unnecessary is that they are so effective. We know that most people desperately want to be good because they are so easily controlled by moral theories.

The logic of obedience to mythology is patently foolish. If a priest tells me that I have to obey “God,” this is exactly the same as him telling me that I must obey an entity called “Nog.” Even if I accept that this fictional entity is worthy of eternal obedience, this still in no way would compel me to obey the priest. If I tell you to “obey your heart,” can I then reasonably say: “and I alone speak for your heart”?

Of course not.

When we strip away mythology and fiction from our “interactions” with our rulers, what emerges is a grim, stark and murderously exploitive reality.

Let’s take as an example a very real and present danger: taxation.

Taxation

I am told that, by virtue of choosing to live in Canada, I owe “the government” more than 50% of my income.

Stripped of mythology, what does this really translate to?

In reality, I will wait until the end of time for “the government” to come and pick up its money. Waiting for “the government” to drop by is like wanting to date the concept “femininity.” I may as well try to pay for my dinner with the word “money.”

In reality, when I am told that I must pay my taxes to “the government,” what this actually means is that I must write a check to transfer my money into a particular bank account, which is then accessed by particular individuals. These individuals then have the right to take that money, and spend it as they see fit – these particular individuals thus have complete control over my money.

At no point whatsoever does any such entity as “the government” lift a finger, make a move, open a bank account, or spend a penny. Imagining that a concept called “the government” has the capacity to take or spend your money is exactly the same as waiting for “God” to come and pick you up and take you to church.

Thus the real interaction is that one guy sends me a letter telling me that I owe him money. I have no contract with this guy, and he does not in fact own any of my property, although some other guys wrote a supposed “contract” which claims that he does.

If I do not pay this guy, he will send another guy over to my house to collect the money – plus “interest” and “charges.”

Normally, when a man with a gun comes to my house and demands my money, I have the right to use force to defend myself. In this case, however, because he is in a costume and claims to represent a fictional entity, I am not allowed to use force to defend myself.

Now, if I come to your house tonight dressed as a “high elf of Narnia” and demand the money that you owe to the “Queen of Sorrows,” assuming it is not Halloween, you are allowed to stare at me in amazement, and order me off your property.

If I do not pay the man who comes to take my money, he is allowed to pull out a gun, point it at my chest, and kidnap me – or shoot me if I resist. He can hold me in a tiny cell for year after year, where I will be subjected to the most violent brutality and continual rape, until he chooses to let me go.

Interestingly, if a man legitimately owes me money, I am not allowed to kidnap him and subject him to torture and rape for year after year.

Thus taxation utterly violates the UPB framework, since it is the violent transfer of property using the initiation of force.

Stealing, as we have proven, is evil.

Einstein revolutionized physics by claiming – and proving – that the speed of light was constant.

We can revolutionize the world by accepting the claim – and the proof – that stealing is always evil.

Government, Religion and UPB

When we take the UPB framework and apply it to moral propositions regarding government and religion, some very interesting results occur.

The proposition that is most often used to justify government power is: “the government has the right to take your money.” This, however, is an utterly imprecise and false statement. The “government” does not have the right to take your money, since “the government” is merely a concept, an abstract description for a self-defined group of people. UPB requires a more consistent and objective statement. Since moral rules must be the same for everyone in all places and at all times, we must rephrase the rule in this way:

“Human beings can morally take money from other human beings if they make up a conceptual agency that justifies their actions.”

If we return to Bob and Doug in our little room of moral experimentation, we can very quickly see that this becomes an impossible proposition.

If Bob says to Doug: “I now represent the ideal concept ‘FUBAR,’ which fully justifies me taking your lighter from you. Since you now owe me your lighter, you must hand it over, or I will be compelled to take it from you by force.”

What will Doug’s reaction be? Remember, according to UPB, whatever is valid for Bob must also be valid for Doug. Inevitably, Doug will reply: “Oh yeah? Well I now represent the ideal concept ‘ANTI-FUBAR,’ which fully justifies me retaining possession of my lighter. Since you now have no right to take my lighter, if you try to take it, I will be compelled to defend myself by force.”

As you can see, if Bob has the right to make up imaginary obligations and impose them on Doug, then Doug has the right to make up imaginary obligations and impose them on Bob. Clearly, we immediately end up in a perfect stalemate. If it is morally good to impose made-up obligations on other people, but it is impossible to do it if everyone possesses that ability, then morality becomes impossible. The only way that Bob can impose his made-up obligation on Doug is if Doug refuses to impose his made up obligation on Bob – thus we have a situation where what is moral for one person can only be achieved by the other person acting in an anti-moral manner. Virtue can thus only be enabled by vice, which is impossible – and we have opposing moral rules for two human beings in the same circumstance, which UPB instantly rejects as invalid.

In other words, every imaginary abstract justification for the use of force can be countered by another imaginary abstract justification for the use of force. If I have an imaginary friend that can justify everything I do, then you also can have an imaginary friend that can justify everything you do. Thus neither of us can possess the ability to impose our imaginary obligations on others.

Religion and UPB

The same holds true for religion.

The statement: “You must obey me because God commands it,” must be restated more accurately as: “an entity that I have made up commands you to obey me.” The principle that UPB requires, then, is: “Human beings must impose unchosen positive obligations on others, and justify those obligations according to imaginary entities.”

Here we see the same issues as above. Bob tells Doug: “You must give me your lighter, because my imaginary friend tells you to.” Naturally, Doug replies: “You must not ask me for your lighter, because my imaginary friend forbids you to.” If Bob’s “commandments” are valid, then Doug’s “commandments” are equally valid, and so cancel each other out.

In the same way, if a man claims that his concept called “the government” justifies his theft of my property, then I can claim that my concept called “the anti-government” justifies my retention of my property, and we are both equally “valid” in our justifications.

If this tax collector then claims that his concept called “the government” only justifies his theft of my property, not my retention of it, then we are no further ahead. He can take my thousand dollars, but then I can invoke my concept to “steal” that money back, and his moral theory commands us to spend the rest of eternity handing back and forth the thousand dollars.

UPB and “The Majority”

UPB does not allow for the accumulation of individuals to override or reverse the properties of each individual. Ten lions do not make an elephant, a government, or a god. Ten thousand soldiers might make an “army,” but they cannot reverse gravity, or make murder moral.

Returning one last time to the room of Bob and Doug, let’s introduce “Jane.”

Now that there are three people in the room, we can look at the “majority rule” principle.

If Bob, Doug and Jane take a “vote” on whether or not it is moral to rape Jane, we would all recoil at such an unjust and immoral premise. Clearly, even if Jane were “outvoted,” we would not consider the resulting rape to be transformed into a morally good act.

Why not?

Well, UPB does not recognize the reality of aggregations, since the “majority” is a mere conceptual tag; it does not exist in reality, any more than “gods” or “governments” do. Thus to claim that the concept of “the majority” has any sort of moral standing is utterly invalid – it is like saying that “the Fatherland” can impregnate a woman, or that one can sit in the word “chair.”

To say that “the majority” has rights or attributes which directly contradict the rights or attributes of any individual also contradicts rational principles, since any conceptual grouping is only validated by the accurate identification of individual characteristics. If I say that “mammals” are warm-blooded living creatures, can I logically include three plastic flamingos in the category “mammal”?

Of course not.

Thus if it is evil for human beings to rape, can I logically create a category called “the majority” and then claim that for these human beings, rape is now morally good?

Of course not.

Majority Rule

Can I create a moral rule that says: “the majority should be able to do whatever it wants”?

Of course I can, but it will never be valid or true.

Only individuals act – the “majority” never does. If moral rules can change when a certain number of people get together, then UPB is continually violated.

If it is moral for Bob and Doug to rape Jane because they have “outvoted her,” what happens when Jane’s two friends show up and vote against Bob and Doug’s infernal desires?

Well, suddenly Bob and Doug are the ones outvoted, and rape becomes “evil” for them again.

Nothing substantial has changed in these “outvoting” scenarios, but we have a series of opposing moral rules for the same men – a violation of UPB, and thus invalid.

Rape cannot be good, then evil, then good again, just because a few hands are raised or lowered.

Thus if you think that “majority rule” sounds like a reasonable moral proposition, and a perfectly valid moral theory, then I am afraid you’re going to have to go back to the beginning of this book and start again! J

Additional Proofs

There are other additional proofs that we can bring to bear on the question of universally preferable behaviour.

The free-market economy

A free-market economy is without a doubt the most efficient and wealth-producing method of organizing the production and consumption of goods and resources within society. Its material success is without equal in human history, or across the world.

The framework of UPB anticipates, validates and explains the reasons for the material successes of a free market economy.

In theory, a free-market economy is based on the application of a universal theory of property rights. By contrast, communism is based on the explicit rejection of a universal theory of property rights. Since we have proven above that universal property rights is the only valid moral theory, this explains at the most fundamental level why communism is such a disaster, while a free-market economy is so materially productive.

Since human beings do in fact have equal rights of property, any social system which rejects this right is doomed to utter failure – just as any bridge planner who rejects the reality of gravity will never be able to build a bridge that stands.

The Scientific Method

Logic and science are in fact methodologies which exist – along with morality – under the umbrella of UPB. In other words, logic and science are both validated by the framework of UPB.

A central question which needs to be answered is: why is the scientific method infinitely superior to other “methodologies” of knowledge acquisition, such as mysticism?

UPB answers this question.

Since any methodology for knowledge acquisition must be universal, consistent, and independent of time and place, the scientific method meets these requirements, while irrational and subjective mysticism is the exact opposite of these requirements.

Public Education

One central principle of free market economics is that quality only really results from voluntarism. Coercion, fundamentally, is inefficient – violence always results in poor quality. The old-style Soviet bakeries never carried good bread; a man who beats his wife will never have a happy marriage.

The initiation of the use of force is always counter to any rational moral theory – it is a specific and explicit violation of UPB. Since public schools are funded through the initiation of the use of force, they are a form of forced association, which is a clear violation of the freedom of association validated by UPB.

Since force violates the moral requirement of avoidability – and a lack of avoidability always breeds poor quality – UPB would help us easily predict that public schools would provide education of low quality.

Furthermore, UPB would also have helped us predict that, as more and more force was used in the realm of public education – as taxes, union compulsions and so on escalated – the quality of the education provided would get worse and worse.

This, of course, was – and is – exactly the case.

Parallels

Before the Scientific Revolution, it was considered inconceivable that the natural world could sustain itself without a conscious and “moral” entity at its centre. The sun rose trailing the chains of a supernatural chariot; the moon was a cold and lonely brother of the sun. Constellations outlined the tales and graves of the gods, and storms stemmed from the rage of demons.

The idea that nature was a self-generating and self-sustaining system was almost unimaginable. The Darwinian revolution, the idea that life was not created, but rather evolved, brought this idea from the material to the biological world.

Before science, at the centre of every complex system lay a virtuous consciousness – without which this system would fly into chaos, and cease to be.

Unfortunately, this “virtuous consciousness” was merely an illusion, to put it most charitably. No such gods existed – all that did exist were the pronouncements of priests. Thus what really lay at the centre was the bias of irrational individuals, who had no idea how mad they really were.

We have yet to apply this same illumination to our conceptions of society – but it is now essential that we do so.

We consider it essential that, at the centre of society, we place a virtuous entity called “the government.” In the absence of this entity, we consider it axiomatic that society will fly into chaos, and cease to be – just as our ancestors considered that, in the absence of gods, the universe itself would fly into chaos, and cease to be.

However, “the government” no more exists than “god” exists.

When we speak of “gods,” we are really talking about “the opinions of priests.”

When we speak of “the government,” we really mean “the violence of a tiny minority.”

The idea of “spontaneous order,” which is well proven in the realms of physics and biology, remains largely inconceivable to us in the realm of society.

However, “governments” are no more needed for the organization and continuance of society than “gods” are required for the organization and continuance of the universe.

In fact, just as religions impeded the progress of science, so do governments impede the progress of society. Just as the illusions of religion caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people throughout history, so have the illusions of government.

Just as the false ethics of religions “justify” all manners of abuse, corruption and violence, so do the false ethics of governments.

When we choose to live by fantasy, we inevitably choose destruction, in one form or another.

When we choose to run society according to religious moral mythologies, we end up with wars, violence, repression, abuse, corruption and bottomless hypocrisy.

When we choose to run society according to statist moral mythologies, the results are no different.

We can either choose virtue or compulsion.

We cannot have both.

Solutions

We can choose to believe that the government is both a necessary and a moral institution. We can choose to believe that, without government, society will collapse into “anarchy,” and the world will dissolve into a war of all against all. We can choose to believe that without the government, there will be no roads, no education, no healthcare, no old-age pensions, no libraries, no protection of property and so on.

Similar superstitions, of course, have retarded the progress of mankind throughout history. The most significant precursor to what UPB reveals about the government is what science revealed about religion.

As science began to practically postulate a universe that could run without a god, all manner of hysterics clamoured that the end of the world was nigh, that society would collapse into “anarchy,” and that civilization would dissolve into a war of all against all.

Any time a system that justifies power can be conceived of running without that power, all those who profit from the manipulation of that power cry out that without them, all is lost.

Priests did this during the onset of the scientific revolution. Without God, life has no meaning. Without God, man has no morality. Without God, our souls cannot be saved. Without God, the world will descend into chaos and evil.

None of it turned out to be true, of course. In fact, quite the reverse turned out to be true. The end of religion as the dominant world-view paved the way for the separation of church and state, the end of the aristocracy, the rise of the free market, the establishment of many human liberties in significant areas of the world.

The fall of God was the rise of mankind.

In the same way, when we begin see society as the early scientists saw the universe – as a self-sustaining system without the need for an imaginary central authority – then we can truly begin to perceive the possibilities of freedom for mankind.

The establishment of a central and coercive monopoly in society perpetually retards the progress of knowledge, of wisdom, of virtue, of physical and mental health – just as the establishment of a central and coercive monopoly in the universe perpetually retarded the progress of knowledge, of wisdom, and science.

The way to oppose imaginary entities is with relentless truth. The way to oppose God is with reason, evidence and science.

The way to oppose the state – the most dangerous imaginary entity – is with reason, evidence and science.

The Future

Whether we like it or not, UPB applies to everything that we do. Human beings have a natural tendency towards consistency, since we are beings with a rational consciousness, inhabiting a consistent and rational universe. Thus whatever premises we accept in our lives tend to compel more and more consistent behaviour throughout our lives – and throughout the “life” of our culture or nation as well.

Thus a man who believes that bullying is a good way to get what he wants tends to bully more and more over the course of his lifetime. A man who believes that violence is good tends to become more and more violent.

In other words, UPB demands consistency even in inconsistency. UPB demands uniformity even in immorality

The root moral premises of a culture thus dictate its inevitable future. A culture built on justifications for coercion will always become more coercive. A culture built on rational liberty will always become less coercive.

That is why the delineation of a rational framework for ethics is so essential.

What we believe is what we become.

If we believe lies, we shall become slaves.

Conclusions

In a relatively short time, we have covered an enormous amount of ground. The greatest challenge of philosophy is the definition of a universal, objective and absolute morality that does not rely on God or the state. The moment that we rely on God or the state for the definition of morality, morality no longer remains universal, objective and absolute. In other words, it is no longer “morality.”

The invention of imaginary entities such as “God” and “the state” does nothing to answer our questions about morality.

We fully understand that the invention of God did nothing – and does nothing – to answer questions about the origin of life, or the universe. To say, in answer to any question, “some incomprehensible being did some inconceivable thing in some unfathomable manner for unknowable purposes,” cannot be considered any sort of rational answer.

The gravest danger in making up incomprehensible “answers” to rational and essential questions is that it provides the illusion of an answer, which in general negates the pursuit of truth. Furthermore, a group inevitably coalesces to defend and profit from this irrational non-answer.

In the realm of religion, this is the priestly caste. In the realm of government, this is the political caste.

When a real and essential question is met with a mystical and violent “answer,” human progress turns to regression. The science of meteorology fails to come into being if the priests say that the rain comes because the gods will it. The science of medicine fails to develop if illness is considered a moral punishment from the gods. The science of physics stalls and regresses if the motion of the stars is considered the clockwork of the deities.

When false answers are presented to moral questions, questioning those answers inevitably becomes a moral crime. When illusions are substituted for curiosity, those who profit from those illusions inevitably end up using violence to defend their lies.

And for evermore, children are the first victims of these exploitive falsehoods.

Children do not have to be bullied into eating candy, playing tag, or understanding that two plus two is four. The human mind does not require that the truth be inflicted through terror, boredom, insults and repetition. A child does not have to be “taught” that a toy is real by telling him that he is damned to hell for eternity if he does not believe that the toy is real. A child does not have to be bullied into believing that chocolate tastes good by being told that his taste buds are damned by original sin.

Saying that morality exists because God tells us that it exists is exactly the same as saying that morality does not exist. If you buy an iPod from me on eBay, and I send you an empty box, you will write to me in outrage. If I tell you not to worry, that my invisible friend assures me that there is in fact an iPod in the box, would you be satisfied? Would not my claim that my invisible friend tells me of the iPod’s existence be a certain proof that the iPod did not in fact exist?

If morality is justified according to the authority of a being that does not exist, then morality by definition is not justified. If I write a check that is “certified” by a bank that does not exist, then clearly my check is by definition invalid.

The same is true for enforcing morality through the irrational monopoly of “the state.” If we allow the existence of a government – a minority of people who claim the right to initiate the use of force, a right which is specifically denied to everyone else – then any and all moral “rules” enforced by the government are purely subjective, since the government is by definition based on a violation of moral rules.

If I say that I need the government to protect my property, but that the government is by definition a group of people who can violate my property rights at will, then I am caught in an insurmountable contradiction. I am saying that my property rights must be defended – and then I create an agency to defend them that can violate them at any time. This is like being so afraid of rape that I hire a bodyguard to protect me from being raped – but in the contract, I allow my bodyguard – and anyone he chooses – to rape me at will.

Because “morality” based on the state and on religion is so irrational and self-contradictory, it requires a social agency with a monopoly on the initiation of force to function. Since everyone is just making up “morals” and claiming absolute justification based on imaginary entities, rational negotiation and understanding remain impossible. We do not need a government because people are bad, but rather, because people are irrational, we end up with a government. False moral theories always end up requiring violence to enforce them. Moral theories are not developed in response to violence – false moral theories cause violence – in fact, demand violence.

The moral subjectivism and irrationality involved in answering “What is truth?” with “God,” and “What is morality?” with “government,” is so openly revealed by the framework of UPB that it is hard to imagine that this concept is not more widespread.

One central reason for this is that truly understanding UPB requires the very highest possible mental functioning. It is relatively easy to be rational; it is very difficult to think about the implicit premises of rationality, and all that they entail. It is relatively easy to debate; it is very difficult to tease out all of the implicit assumptions involved in the very act of debating.

It is easy to catch a ball – it is hard to invent the physics that explain motion universally.

Thinking about thinking is the hardest mental discipline of all.

At the beginning of this book, I talked about a “beast” that terrified and enslaved mankind. This beast is always located on a mountaintop, or in a deep cave. People are afraid of the beast in the world, which is why the beast has never been defeated.

The beast has never been defeated because the beast is an illusion.

The beast cannot be defeated in the world, because the beast is within ourselves.

The collective fantasy that there exists a “null zone,” where morality magically reverses itself, called “the government” is exactly the same as the collective fantasy that there exists a “null zone” called “God” where reality reverses itself.

If we define “morality” according to the subjective fantasies of mere mortals, then it will forever remain under the manipulative control of power-hungry tyrants. Since God does not exist, anyone who speaks about morality in relation to God is just making up definitions to serve his own purposes.

Since “the state” does not exist, anyone who speaks about morality in relation to government is just making up definitions to serve his own purposes.

Until we can define an objective and rational morality that is free from the subjective whims of each individual, we will never make the kind of progress that we need to as a species.

Morality, like physics, biology, geology and chemistry, must join the realm of the sciences if we are to flourish – and indeed, perhaps, to survive at all.

However, if we can sustain our courage, it is this discipline alone that can set us, and our children – and all humanity in the future – free from the tyranny of the greatest beast: our own moral illusions.

For more information on philosophy, please visit Freedomain at www.freedomain.com for free podcasts, articles, videos, and a thriving online community.

Appendix A: UPB in a Nutshell

Below, please find a summation of the core argument for morality.

1. Reality is objective and consistent.
2. “Logic” is the set of objective and consistent rules derived from the consistency of reality.
3. Those theories that conform to logic are called “valid.”
4. Those theories that are confirmed by empirical testing are called “accurate.”
5. Those theories that are both valid and accurate are called “true.”
6. “Preferences” are required for life, thought, language and debating.
7. Debating requires that both parties hold “truth” to be both objective and universally preferable.
8. Thus the very act of debating contains an acceptance of universally preferable behaviour (UPB).
9. Theories regarding UPB must pass the tests of logical consistency and empirical verification.
10. The subset of UPB that examines enforceable behaviour is called “morality.”
11. As a subset of UPB, no moral theory can be considered true if it is illogical or unsupported by empirical evidence.
12. Moral theories that are supported by logic and evidence are true. All other moral theories are false.

Appendix B: Moral Categories

Below is a sample table that lists some of the most common categories of actions/rules, and their key differentiators.

Action / Rule	Preference?	Universal?	Enforceable?	Requires initiating action on the part of the victim?	Can violators be avoided?	Moral Category
Running for the bus.	No	No	n/a	n/a	n/a	Neutral
You should not like ice cream.	Yes	No	No	n/a	n/a	Neutral (personal preference)
You should not be late.	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	APA
You should not commit fraud.	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Good
You should not rape.	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Good

Appendix C: UPB Podcasts

If you would like to further your understanding of UPB and its ramifications, you might find the following podcasts (available at www.freedomain.com) helpful.

You may also wish to watch the “Introduction to Philosophy” videos, available at www.youtube.com/freedomainradio.

Track	Title	Description
8	Proving Libertarian Morality	One of the central challenges faced by libertarians is the need to prove that libertarian moral theory is universally correct, while statist and collectivistic moral theories are incorrect. Here's how to do it!
560	Call In Show Dec 17 2006	Universally preferable behaviour and rating dating.
562	Universally Preferable Behaviour for Children	The ABCs of UPB.
872	Debating and UPB	Can you debate without using UPB?
7	The Argument From Morality (or, how we will win!)	The most powerful argument for freedom.
148	The “Ought To” Challenge - Morality does not exist in reality	The journey from the “ought” to the “is.”
260	Moral Objectivity	Using the scientific method to define morality.
261	Is And Ought and Ethics	Anyone who argues ethics agrees with ethics.
318	Moral Experimentation	Empirical proofs of abstract ethics.
412	Nit Picky City	Get out of the lifeboat! Detonating the 'gray areas' of morality.
540	Testing Morality	Can you judge a moral theory by its effects?
555	Scientific Morality	Excellent ethical questions from a poster.
557	Testing Ethics	Reasonable standards for ethical theories.
567	Morals Ethics & Aesthetics	Right and wrong from murder to manners...
588	Positive Obligations - An Example	An excellent critique of one of my articles.
816	Tennis Anyone?	A metaphor for moral action.

Finally, if you would like to debate these ideas with other interested philosophers, feel free drop by the Freedomain Message Board at www.freedomain.com/board.

Appendix D: Every UPB Debate I’ve Ever Had…

UPB Sceptic: UPB is invalid.

Me: How do you know?

UPB Sceptic: It's not proven!

Me: So “proof” is UPB?

UPB Sceptic: No, nothing is UPB.

Me: Isn't the statement "nothing is UPB" UPB?

UPB Sceptic: No, that's not what I'm saying at all! I'm saying that UPB is invalid!

Me: Why?

UPB Sceptic: Because it's false!

Me: So presenting true arguments is UPB?

UPB Sceptic: No!

Me: So there's nothing wrong with false arguments?

UPB Sceptic: No.

Me: Then why are you opposing a false argument?

UPB Sceptic: Oh, it's just my personal preference. I just dislike falsehood.

Me: So you're arguing for a merely personal preference?

UPB Sceptic: Sure!

Me: So why should your personal preference take precedence over mine? I like UPB, you don't – and why bother debating personal preferences at all?

UPB Sceptic: Oh - because UPB is invalid!

Me: Why is it invalid?

UPB Sceptic: Because it's self-contradictory!

Me: So consistency is UPB?

UPB Sceptic: No! And stop repeating the same points over and over! And go read Kant / Hegel / Hume etc.

etc etc etc...

Lloyd DeMause has made major contributions to the study of Psychohistory which is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. Psychohistory seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the family (especially child abuse), and psychological studies of anthropology and ethnology. Audiobook read by Stefan Molyneux. 

Click here for the text, photos and references from the book.