The Austrian Economics Wiki - User contributions [en]

Book talk:On Truth

2010-12-02T03:58:41Z

Anarchei:

I'm sorry but this does not seem like an entry at all but rather a huge vanity post. This, and the other entries by the same author, need to conform to some style guidelines or be deleted. --[[User:Jatucker|Jatucker]] 16:53, 1 December 2010 (CST)

:If that is the case, why not simply move this book, and the others, to the literature section of the main LvMI website? [[User:Anarchei|Anarchei]] 21:58, 1 December 2010 (CST)

Book talk:Universally Preferable Behaviour

2010-12-01T23:12:20Z

Anarchei:

The full text of a book by a living author? This is probably not the best use of the Mises wiki. It certainly is not what users expect of this service. We might need to formulate some rules governing issues like this. --[[User:Jatucker|Jatucker]] 08:14, 1 December 2010 (CST)

:I do agree with Jatucker. This should not be a repository of books. Also the use of expressions in the first person is not in the spirit of the site, IMHO. [[User:Portuguese|Portuguese]] 10:50, 1 December 2010 (CST)

:Mises Wiki claims to be a "Global Repository of Classical-Liberal Thought" which is a collection or library. This calls to mind all content that fits into that category, including books. If books are not going to be hosted here, maybe changing the slogan to say "encyclopaedia" instead of "repository" might help avoid confusion. [[User:Anarchei|Anarchei]] 17:12, 1 December 2010 (CST)

== Copyright status ==

What is the copyright status of this work? I'm looking at the pdf version [http://www.freedomainradio.com/free/books/FDR_2_PDF_UPB.pdf] and I see:
:Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, Copyright 2007 by Stefan Molyneux. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
If this is the case, we definitely can't host it here. And Stefan can't say "Sure, it's okay to put it on Mises Wiki" – he would need to specifically say that he releases it under the CC-BY-3.0 license and waives all rights not protected by that license. --[[User:Forgottenman|Forgottenman]] ([[User talk:Forgottenman|talk]]) 10:18, 1 December 2010 (CST)

Human Action

2010-12-01T08:47:06Z

Anarchei: Added category

{{Stub}} __NOTOC__ 
Human Action is the magnum opus of [[Ludwig von Mises]], first published in 1949. It defined a large part of present [[Austrian Economics]].

==Contents==
=== Part One: Human Action ===

<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;">
<li> Acting Man</li>
<li> The Epistemological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action</li>
<li> Economics and the Revolt Against Reason</li>
<li> A First Analysis of the Category of Action</li>
<li> Time</li>
<li> Uncertainty</li>
<li> Action Within the World</li>
</ol>

=== Part Two: Actions Within the Framework of Society ===

<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;" start="8">
<li> Human Society</li>
<li> The Role of Ideas</li>
<li> Exchange Within Society</li>
</ol>

=== Part Three: Economic Calculation ===

<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;" start="11">
<li> Valuation Without Calculation</li>
<li> The Sphere of Economic Calculation</li>
<li> Monetary Calculation as a Tool of Action</li>
</ol>

=== Part Four: Catallactics or Economics of the Market Society ===

<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;" start="15">
<li> The Market</li>
<li> Prices</li>
<li> Indirect Exchange</li>
<li> Action in the Passing of Time</li>
<li> Interest</li>
<li> Interest, Credit Expansion, and the Trade Cycle</li>
<li> Work and Wages</li>
<li> The Nonhuman Original Factors of Production</li>
<li> The Data of the Market</li>
<li> Harmony and Conflict of Interests</li>
</ol>

=== Part Five: Social Cooperation Without a Market ===

<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;" start="25">
<li> The Imaginary Construction of a Socialist Society</li>
<li> The Impossibility of Economic Calculation Under Socialism</li>
</ol>

=== Part Six: The Hampered Market Economy ===

<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;" start="27">
<li> The Government and the Market</li>
<li> Interference by Taxation</li>
<li> Restriction of Production</li>
<li> Interference with the Structure of Prices</li>
<li> Currency and Credit Manipulation</li>
<li> Confiscation and Redistribution</li>
<li> Syndicalism and Corporativism</li>
<li> The Economics of War</li>
<li> The Welfare Principle Versus the Market Principle</li>
<li> The Crisis of Interventionism</li>
</ol>

=== Part Seven: The Place of Economics in Society ===
<ol style="list-style-type:upper-roman;" start="38">
<li> The Nondescript Character of Economics</li>
<li> The Place of Economics in Learning</li>
<li> Economics and the Essential Problems of Human Existence</li>
</ol>

==External links==
{{Store|http://www.mises.org/store/Human-Action-The-Scholars-Edition-P119.aspx|Human Action (Scholar's Edition)}}
* read the complete [http://www.mises.org/resources/3250 online edition] ([http://mises.org/humanaction/pdf/humanaction.pdf pdf]) or purchase [http://www.mises.org/store/Human-Action-The-Scholars-Edition-P119.aspx Human Action], The Scholar's Edition
* listen to the [http://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=139 free audiobook] of Human Action, read by Jeff Riggenbach
* the complete [http://www.mises.org/books/humanactionstudy.pdf Study Guide] (pdf), partially attached to the online version of Human Action, also [http://www.mises.org/store/Human-Action-Study-Guide-P547.aspx for sale]
* the [[Wikipedia:Human Action|Wikipedia page]]

{{See also|Human Action Comics}}
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Ludwig von Mises]]

The Theory of Money and Credit

2010-12-01T08:45:31Z

Anarchei: Added category

'''''The Theory of Money and Credit''''', by [[Ludwig von Mises]], contains an explanation of the quantity theory of money based on the subjective, marginal utility theory. It describes money's origin, the development and nature of banking, the cause and consequences of inflation and credit expansion, the differences in the value of different moneys, as well as the reason for "cyclical" economic fluctuations.<ref>[http://mises.org/misesbib/m12btmc.asp Chronological Bibliography of Mises' Work]</ref>

==Overview==
This is [[Ludwig von Mises|Ludwig von Mises']] first major work, originally published in German in 1912 as [[Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel]]. It has ever since been recognized as a basic textbook of monetary theory. The most important theoretical contribution was to integrate monetary theory with general utility theory. This had been considered an impossible accomplishment, since money is (aside from its value as a commodity) valued for its purchasing power. How then can it have a utility of its own? Mises solved this problem through the monetary regression theorem, developing the earlier work of [[Carl Menger]]. He showed that the purchasing power of money at a particular period or "day" stems from its value the preceding "day." This process goes back until one arrives at a value due entirely to the monetary commodity's value as a non-monetary commodity. Money was then originally a commodity like any other.

Mises claimed that money can only have originated in this way. Only the market, not the fiat of the state, can give rise to money. In the course of integrating monetary theory into general economics, Mises criticized the quantity theory of money. Equations do not explain the individual actions of people in reacting to changes in the supply and demand of money. The work also includes a discussion of "forced saving" that exerted considerable influence. In addition, of course, the book discusses the standard issues of monetary theory, since it was intended for use as a comprehensive textbook on money and banking

==Development history==
The German word ''Umlaufsmittel'' literally translates as "means of circulation" and was translated into the text of the English version as "fiduciary media". The first English publisher thought the unusual terminology would irritate readers and substituted "money and credit" in the title, thereby losing the specific distinction Mises had made in selecting his original term. This failed to
honor the fact that even in the original German version the expression was unusual. Mises was hostile to innovations in language that were not justified by the analysis of hitherto neglected phenomena. The difference between money certificates on the one hand, and ''Umlaufsmittel'' on the other was such a neglected phenomenon, to the point that established scientific terminology
even lacked the means for expressing this difference. Mises thus introduced the expression ''Umlaufsmittel'' for this purpose and even used it in the title of his book to highlight its importance.<ref>Hülsmann, Jörg Guido, 2007. ''Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism''. p. 217, note 7. </ref>

The newer 1953 edition includes an essay on [[monetary reconstruction]]. Here Mises strongly supports a full return to the gold standard, as the only means of avoiding inflation. The operation of the system is virtually "automatic": nothing depends on the decision of particular government administrators. Here, it is important to note, Mises has in mind the "pure" gold standard, rather than the gold exchange standard. Although the views in this essay are entirely consistent with the earlier part of the book, Mises expresses himself in a distinctly more vehement way here.

==Reception==
[[John Maynard Keynes]], although generally complimentary, criticized the book as unoriginal in his review of the German edition in ''Economic Journal'' XXIV:417-19. This was in spite of his later admission that he could not understand original contributions if written in German.

==Contents==

'''Part One: The Nature of Money'''
:1. The Function of Money
:2. On the Measurement of Value
:3. The Various Kinds of Money
:4. Money and the State
:5. Money as an Economic Good
:6. The Enemies of Money

'''Part Two: The Value of Money'''

:7. The Concept of the Value of Money
:8. The Determinants of the Objective Exchange Value, or Purchasing Power, of Money
:9. The Problem of the Existence of Local Differences in the Objective Exchange Value of Money
:10. The Exchange Ration Between Money of Different Kinds
:11. The Problem of Measuring the Objective Exchange Value of Money
:12. The Social Consequences of Variations in the Objective Exchange Value of Money
:13. Monetary Policy
:14. The Monetary Policy of Etatism

'''Part Three: Money and Banking'''

:15. The Business of Banking
:16. The Evolution of Fiduciary Media
:17. Fiduciary Media and the Demand for Money
:18. The Redemption of Fiduciary Media
:19. Money, Credit, and Interest
:20. Problems of Credit Policy

'''Part Four: Monetary Reconstruction'''

:21. The Principle of Sound Money
:22. Contemporary Currency Systems
:23. The Return to Sound Money

''Appendix A. On the Classification of Monetary Theories''

===Publication history===
*''Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel / Theory of Money and the Means of Circulation'', Munich & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1912.
*2nd edition in German, 1924.
*London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. First translation (by Harold E. Batson) into English from the original German, 1934.
*New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Expanded edition with an essay on [[Monetary Reconstruction]] appearing in Part Four, 1953.
*Indianapolis,. Ind. Liberty Fund. ISBN 0-913966-70-3. 541 pages. Hardcover. (Softcover ISBN 0-913966-71-1), 1981.
*Auburn, Al. [[Ludwig von Mises Institute]]. ISBN 9781933550558. 493 pages. Hardcover, 2009.

[http://mises.org/misesbib/m1902.asp Full publication history], including translations to Chinese, Japanese and Spanish.

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
{{Store|http://mises.org/store/Theory-of-Money-and-Credit-The--P57.aspx}}
* ''The Theory of Money and Credit'', 1953 edition:
** [http://www.mises.org/books/Theory_Money_Credit/Contents.aspx Full text in HTML]
** [http://www.mises.org/books/tmc.pdf Full text in PDF]

* ''The Theory of Money and Credit'', 1981 edition:
** [http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msT.html Full text in HTML]

* [http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard128.html Foreword to the 1981 Edition] by [[Murray Rothbard]]

{{Stub}}

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Ludwig von Mises]]
[[Category:Writings on economics]]

Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays

2010-12-01T08:44:45Z

Anarchei: Added category

'''''Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays''''' represents some of [[Murray Rothbard]]'s most advanced and radical theorizing on topics impacting on human liberty.

==Summary==
Appearing first in 1974, this volume looks beyond conventional left-right thinking and hence contributes to the groundwork for the current intellectual challenge against centralized social and economic management.

The book's title comes from the lead essay, which argues that [[Egalitarianism|egalitarian theory]] always results in a politics of [[Statism|statist]] control because it is founded on revolt against the ontological structure of reality itself. According to Rothbard in this lead essay, statist intellectuals attempt to replace what exists with a Romantic image of an idealized primitive state of nature, an ideal which cannot and should not be achieved, according to Rothbard. The implications of this point are worked out on topics such as market economics, child rights, environmentalism, feminism, foreign policy, redistribution and others.

[[Roy Childs]] writes in the Foreword: <blockquote>"For until Rothbard's work is carefully studied by every advocate of liberty, the value of his contributions to the libertarian system cannot be fully appreciated and, moreover, the unity and true historical context of libertarianism will not even be fully grasped."</blockquote>

==Table of contents==

*Prefaces
** Introduction to the Second Edition, by David Gordon (2000)
** Introduction to the First Edition, by Murray Rothbard (1974)
** Foreword to the 1974 Edition, by Roy A. Childs, Jr.
*Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature
*Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
*The Anatomy of the State
*Justice and Property Rights
*War, Peace, and the State
*The Fallacy of the Public Sector
*Kid Lib
*The Great Women's Liberation Issue: Setting it Straight
*Conservation in the Free Market
*The Meaning of Revolution
*National Liberation
*Anarcho-Communism
*The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economist's View
*Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for Our Age
*Why Be Libertarian?
*Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor

==Publishing history==

* Auburn, Alabama: [[Ludwig von Mises Institute]]. 2000. Paperback. ISBN 0-945466-23-4.
* Washington, D.C.: [[Libertarian Review]] Press. June 1974.

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Murray N. Rothbard]]

Against Intellectual Property

2010-12-01T08:30:53Z

Anarchei: /* External links */ correction

'''''Against Intellectual Property''''' is a book written by [[Stephan Kinsella]] that makes the case that [[intellectual property]] (IP) is wrong on a moral basis. This takes a step away from the usual debate about IP, which is more focused on how to maximize creativity or the artists earnings.

== External links ==
{{Store|http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.aspx|Against Intellectual Property}}
*[http://mises.org/books/against.pdf Digital version]

{{stub}}

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stephan Kinsella]]

Against Intellectual Property

2010-12-01T08:29:59Z

Anarchei: Mises Store box and link to PDF

'''''Against Intellectual Property''''' is a book written by [[Stephan Kinsella]] that makes the case that [[intellectual property]] (IP) is wrong on a moral basis. This takes a step away from the usual debate about IP, which is more focused on how to maximize creativity or the artists earnings.

== External links ==
{{Store|http://mises.org/store/Against-Intellectual-Property-P523.aspx|Against Intellectual Property)}}
*[http://mises.org/books/against.pdf Digital version]

{{stub}}

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stephan Kinsella]]

Book:Against The Gods?

2010-12-01T08:16:34Z

Anarchei: Removed white space

'''''Against The Gods?''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]] written in 2010.

----

{{rightTOC}}
== 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.<ref>If someone insists that consciousness can exist without a brain, ask them to demonstrate the proposition without using his brain.</ref>

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.<ref>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.”</ref>

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.<ref>The fact that the wall might be an archway in another dimension will scarcely help their passage in this one.</ref>

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 25th 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 recognise 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 analogise 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 civilised 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 universalised, 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.”
*Etcetera.

For any religion that involves prayer or supplication to be valid, the following steps must all be rationally validated and empirically proven:
#A deity must exist (call him “Jeb”).
#Jeb must have the interest and power to interfere in the universe.
#Jeb must have the interest and willingness to interfere in human affairs.
#Jeb must listen to prayers, rather than just read minds.
#Jeb must only listen to prayers from the members of a particular sect.
#Jeb must monitor and record good and bad behaviour.
#Ideally, Jeb must punish the members of alternate sects, or those who pray in an incorrect or inconsistent fashion.
#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 universalisation.

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 traumatised 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.<ref>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?</ref>

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 civilised society.”

I cannot lock my neighbour 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 labour 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 labour 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 institutionalisation 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 favour 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 favour 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 criticise 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 apologise 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 anthropomorphised 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. Rationalising 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 favour of the mental fog of agnosticism, I consider that cowardly and enormously destructive.

We cannot be reasonably criticised 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 criticise 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 criticised, 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.<ref>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.</ref>

== 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, ostracising 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 colours, 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 recognise 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 recognise 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 organised 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 organised 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 recognise 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 appetiser, 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 legalisation 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.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/atgpdf Digital version]
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/atgaudio Audio version]
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/atgbook Print version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:Against The Gods?

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Against Intellectual Property

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Book:Everyday Anarchy

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'''''Everyday Anarchy''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]] written in 2008. It was followed by ''[[Practical Anarchy]]'' and ''[[Achieving Freedom]]''.

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== 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,” etcetera. 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 labelled a stodgy prude.

Words are also weapons of judgement – primarily moral judgement. 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, 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 am 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, moustachioed 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 spectre; the haunted and angry mutterings of over-caffeinated and seemingly-eternal graduate 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):

#Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder.
#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 organisation.”

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 spectres of chaos and brutality always arise for us, immediately and, it would seem, irrevocably.

However, it only takes a moment of thought to realise 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 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 spectre 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 spectre 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 characterised 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 ten-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 tin-pot 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 neighbourhoods 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 neighbourhoods 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 eighty percent.

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 maximisation 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, etcetera. 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 recognise 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 judgement, nor the withholding of judgement 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 their 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 moustaches). 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 organisation.

== Anarchy and History ==
Our clichéd vision of the typical anarchist tends to see him emerging shortly before World War One, 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 ten 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 nineteenth 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 nineteenth century US murder rates with the six hundred thousand 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 – patronising 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 “Christianise” and civilise 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 intellectualisation, which is why governments always want to fund higher education and subsidise intellectuals. We shall get to more of this later.

Even outside war, in the twentieth century alone, more than two hundred seventy 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 unravelling 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 counter-productive 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 enrolment 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 patronising “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 nineteenth 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 one-two 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 ten to twenty percent 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 petrol 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 favours 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 favours, 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:
#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”;
#the monopolists were not gaining market share or unjust profits through political means, because the legislatures were still available for sale; and
#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 rail-cars to store meat, a price drop of thirty percent 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 one hundred years later, we can still see how effective this propaganda really is. The spectres 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 analogise this situation, can we imagine that we would be at all surprised that children who came out of fourteen 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-colour 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 rancour, 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 one is truly wise, falls at least a little in love with the difficulties of their 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 they 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 realise that the government is the worst possible solution for this problem – if indeed it is a problem.

The problem of the commons recognises 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 their own fields, because they want to profit from their utilisation 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 ten thousand dollars 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 institutionalising 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 defence 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 organisation – 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 organisation such as collective self-defence, 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 organisation 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 recreated in a stateless society is directly analogous to asking an economist what the economy will look like down to the last detail fifty 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 theorising 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 twenty 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 manoeuvred 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 twenty-five 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 defence 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 recognise 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 organisation upon you.

Thus when the anarchist is expected to answer every possible question regarding how society will be organised in the absence of a government, any failure to perfectly answer even one of them completely validates the anarchist’s position.

If we recognise that no individual has the capacity to run society (“dictatorship”), and we recognise 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:
#the majority of voters are wise and virtuous enough to judge an incredibly wide variety of complex proposals by politicians;
#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; and
#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 spectres 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, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

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, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

This paradox cannot be unravelled 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 to 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-defence).

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 recognise 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 neutralised, 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.<ref> 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. </ref>

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 recognise 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 institutionalise 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.<ref> 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. </ref>

== 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 films, 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 ticker-tape 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 films 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 film 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 nationalised 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 make 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 eleven, I went to the Ontario Science Centre, 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 realise 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 realise 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 theorise 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 unravelled.

If we recognise 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 succour 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 forty 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 Two, 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 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 films, 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 them to be a good, productive, and rational adult, then not hitting them is obviously a form of lax parenting, if not outright abuse. Hitting your child thus becomes a form of moral responsibility, and thus a positive good, much like yanking them back from running into traffic and ensuring that they eats their vegetables.

Such a parent, of course, reacts with outrage and indignation if you suggest to them that there are more productive alternatives to violence when it comes to raising children – for the obvious reason that if those alternatives exist, their violence turns from a positive good to a moral evil. This is the situation that an anarchist faces when they talk about non-violent alternatives to existing coercive “solutions.” If there is a non-violent 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 recognise 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 categorising 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 meagre 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, 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 neighbourhoods, then you are really saying that the poor are poor because they lack restraint and judgement, 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 short-sighted and savage band – then it is clear that they do not have the judgement 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, 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 judgement, 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 judgement, but they have been educated by the government for almost fifteen 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 fifteen years as a software entrepreneur, which may have coloured 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 realised 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. Recognising 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 criticise 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, grass-roots 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 neighbourhood – 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 ten 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 two thousand 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 eighteen, 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.<ref>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.</ref>

However, to say that the same person 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 they were born, without their prior choice – since they did not choose where they were 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 thirty percent. 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 ten 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, paedophilia, 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 civilised 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 counselled 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 an oxymoron. 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.

== Anarchy 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 close of the war of 1812. Although just over one billion dollars was spent in 2005 subsidising 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 2am 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 ten thousand 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 five percent 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 ten, twenty, or thirty 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 any more. 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 neighbourhood, 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 sky-rocket – 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!

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 favours 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 they are going to cut. You never hear them say that they are 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.<ref>At the moment, the current fetish – in leftist circles – is to pretend that forty-seven million Americans can get “free” healthcare if the government lowers the tax breaks on a few billionaires.</ref>

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 favours down the road is only going to do so if he believes that the candidate will fulfil 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 favours 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 their product is passed around in certain other communities.

Thus we know that any candidate who receives significant funding from special interest groups is someone who has consistently proven their “integrity to corruptibility” in the past – for if they have no track record, or an inconsistent track record, no one will give them money to get started.<ref>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.</ref>

In other words, whenever you see a name on the ballot, you can be completely certain that name represents someone who has already been bought and paid for over the course of many years, and that those who have paid for them 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 twenty thousand dollars to his campaign, and in return he granted them a ten percent raise. Now that he is running for his second term, and cannot give them another ten percent 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 centre, 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 ten percent 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 ten percent 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 channelled 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 back-room 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 back-room deals in turn.<ref>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 favour 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.</ref>

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 defence 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 organising 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 realise.

If I put forward the charge that our society is currently organised 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, etcetera.

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 recognise about academia is that, since it is highly subsidised 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 labour 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 subsidised 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 thirty-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 subsidised 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 sceptical 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 enrolment in his courses mysteriously declining, which will not be helpful to his career, to say the least.

If the professor does not mention the graduate 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 counter-productive 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 judgement,” (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 organise society. Violence in the form of self-defence is acceptable, of course, but the initiation of the use of force is not only morally evil, but counter-productive 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 centralised 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 recognise 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 back-room 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-organisation 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 Voluntaryism ===
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 institutionalised 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 defence 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 dishevelled 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 recognise how you will view him, based on his presentation? If he does not realise 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,<ref>I would like to apologise for any trauma caused by this image.</ref> 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 judgement 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 organise 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 criticise for failing to implement free trade.

If economists believe that free market voluntarism is the best way to organise 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 behaviour 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 organisation 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 organisations 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 pretence 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 Socialising ===
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 unoffended 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.<ref>See “Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics”.</ref>

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 honourably submit ourselves to a moral teacher; we cannot honourably 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 graduate 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 favour, 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 PhD 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 criticise 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 tantalising mythology that does help the average graduate 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 merely 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 defence 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 fall-back 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.<ref>“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 fourteenth century through the rise of cities, and the subsequent necessity for more comprehensive and detailed civic laws.</ref> 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 twentieth 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 two hundred 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 Theatre 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 game-play 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 characterised 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, long, stony, and hard.

I truly hope that you will join us.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/EAPDF Digital version]
*[http://fdrurl.com/EALOW Audio version]
*[http://www.lulu.com/content/2488026 Print version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:On Truth

2010-12-01T06:40:19Z

Anarchei: Forgot link to author

'''''On Truth: The Tyranny Of Illusion''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]] written in 2007.

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{{rightTOC}}
From a short-term, merely practical standpoint, you really do not want to read this book. This book will mess up your life, as you know it. This book will change every single one of your relationships – most importantly, your relationship with yourself. This book will change your life even if you never implement a single one of the proposals it contains. This book will change you even if you disagree with every single idea it puts forward. Even if you put it down right now, this book will have changed your life, because now you know that you are afraid of change.

This book is radioactive and painful – it is only incidentally the kind of radiation and pain that will cure you.

== Relationships ==
There are really only three kinds of relationships in the world. The first kind is the one we all dream of – joyous, mutually beneficial, deep, meaningful, fun, a real pleasure to have and to hold.

This kind of relationship is extraordinarily rare. If this kind of relationship were an animal, it would not even be on the endangered list. It would be by many considered extinct.

The second kind of relationship is mutually beneficial, but not joyous, deep, or meaningful. This is the kind of relationship you have with your grocer, your banker, and perhaps your boss. It is voluntary, defined by an implicit or explicit contract, and can usually be broken or allowed to lapse without guilt, regret or remorse.

This kind of relationship is not uncommon, but also not very important. We do not lose our lives, our happiness or our very souls in the pits of these kinds of relationships. They are, as the saying goes, “dry calculations of mutual utility.” We are not obligated to go to the deathbeds of our bankers; our grocers do not force us to attend church when we do not believe; we rarely get into fights with our bosses about whether or not we should baptise our children.

No, it is the third kind of relationship that we are most concerned with in our lives. It is the third kind of relationship that so often tortures us. It is the third kind of relationship that undermines our joy, integrity and independence.

The first kind of relationship does not involve obligation, but pleasure. There is no need for guilt or manipulation, bullying or control, demands, tears or passive-aggression. We do not need obligation to draw us to that which gives us pleasure, any more than a child needs to be cajoled into eating his candy.

The second kind of relationship does involve obligation, but it is voluntarily chosen, for mutual advantage. We pay our mortgage; the bank gives us a house. The relationship is contractual, and thus does not need guilt or manipulation.

It is the third kind of relationship that this book will focus on.

It is the third kind of relationship that is eating us alive.

== The Third Kind ==
The third kind of relationship has three main components. The first is that it is not chosen; the second is that it involves obligations, and the third is that it is considered moral.

The first and most important aspect of these kinds of relationships is that they are not entered into voluntarily. You are born into them. You do not choose your parents. You do not choose your siblings. You do not choose your extended family. You do not choose your country. You do not choose your culture. You do not choose your government. You do not choose your religion. You do not choose your school. You do not choose your teachers.

Sadly, when you are a child, the list is nearly endless.

You are born into this world without choice, into a familial, social, educational, political and geographical environment that is merely accidental. And for the rest of your life, everyone will try to convince you that you are responsible for this accident.

Your parents decided to have a child – you were in no way involved in the choice, since you did not as yet exist when the decision was made. Even if you were conceived by accident, or adopted, your parents decided to keep you.

Thus your parents’ relationship with you when you were a child was essentially contractual, in the same way that when you buy a dog, you’re obligated to feed it. Naturally, it is preferable – and certainly possible – for your relationship with your parents to be loving, mutually enjoyable, respectful and great fun all around.

But as I said before, this kind of relationship is, sadly, all too rare.

Entire generations of children have grown up with the idea that the act of being born creates an obligation.

This is entirely false, and one of the most destructive myths of mankind.

First, I will tell you what is true. Then I will tell you why it is true. Then I will tell you how to change.

== What Is True ==
It is true that your parents chose to have you. It is true that by making that choice, your parents assumed a voluntary obligation towards you. That obligation consisted of two main parts: the first was physical, the second was moral.

The physical part of that obligation was clothing, food, medical attention, shelter and so on – the base physical requirements. I am not going to spend much time on that in this book, since the vast majority of parents succeed in providing food and shelter for their children – and those who fail in this regard are so obviously deficient that a philosophical book is scarcely required to illuminate their shortcomings.

The moral obligations that your parents assumed by having you were twofold. The first part is more or less understood in society, and consists of all the standard virtues such as educating you, keeping you safe, refraining from physical or emotional abuse and so on.

The second part of your parents’ moral obligation towards you is much more subtle and corrosive. This is the realm of integrity, and it is a great challenge for societies throughout the world.

=== Integrity ===
Integrity can be defined as consistency between reality, ideas and behaviour. Consistency with reality is not telling a child that daddy is “sick” when he is in fact drunk. Consistency with behaviour is not slapping a child for hitting another child. The value of this kind of integrity is also well understood by many, even if imperfectly practised, and we will not deal with it much here either.

It is consistency with ideas that causes the most problems for families – and the most long-term suffering for children throughout their lives.
When you were a child, you were told over and over that certain actions were either good or bad. Telling the truth was good; stealing was bad. Hitting your brother was bad; helping your grandmother was good. Being on time was good; failing to complete chores was bad.

Implicit in all these instructions – moral instructions – was the premise that your parents knew what was right and what was wrong; what was good, and what was bad.

Do you think that was really true? Do you think that your parents knew what was right and wrong when you were a child?

When we tell a child that something is wrong – not just incorrect, but morally wrong – there are really only two possibilities. The first is that we actually know what is right and wrong in general, and we are applying our universal knowledge of right and wrong to a specific action committed by the child.

This is how it is always portrayed to the child. It is almost always the most dangerous lie in the world.

The second possibility is that we are telling our child that his actions are “wrong” for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever.

For instance, we might tell a child that stealing is wrong because:
#We are embarrassed at our child’s actions.
#We are afraid of being judged a poor parent.
#We are afraid that our child’s theft will be discovered.
#We are simply repeating what was told to us.
#We enjoy humiliating our child.
#Correcting our child on “ethics” makes us feel morally superior.
#We want our child to avoid behaviour that we were punished for as children.

... and so on

Assuming they are not terrified, most children, on first receiving moral instructions, will generally respond by asking “why?” Why is stealing wrong? Why is lying wrong? Why is bullying wrong? Why is hitting wrong?

These are all perfectly valid questions, akin to asking why the sky is blue. The problem arises in the fact that parents have no rational answers, but endlessly pretend that they do.

When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.

Since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics. As an atheist, I do not mourn the loss of the illusions of gods and devils, but I am alarmed at the fact that we have not yet admitted that the fall of religion has not provided us an objective and rational moral compass. By failing to admit to the fact that we do not know what we are doing ethically, we are perpetrating a grave moral error on our children.

Basically, we are lying to them about being good.

We tell them that certain things they do are right or wrong – yet we do not tell them that we do not know why those things are right or wrong. If our child asks us why lying is wrong, we can say that it causes people pain – but so does dentistry – or we can say “you don’t like it when someone lies to you” – which would be an incentive to not get caught, not to refrain from lying – and so on. Every answer we come up with leads to more questions and inconsistencies. What do we do then?

Why, then, we must bully them.

This does not mean hitting them or yelling at them – though sadly all too often this is the case – because as parents we have a near-infinity of passive-aggressive tactics such as sighing, acting exasperated, changing the subject, offering them a cookie, taking them for a walk, claiming to be “too busy,” distracting or rejecting them in a million and one ways.

These kinds of innocent questions about morality represent a kind of horror for parents. As parents, we must retain our moral authority over our children – but as citizens of modernity, we have no rational basis for that moral authority. Thus we are forced to lie to our children about being good, and about our knowledge of goodness, which transforms virtue from a rational discipline into a fearful fairy tale.

In the past, when religious mythology was dominant, when children asked “Where does the world come from?” parents could reply that God made it. Despite the superstitious ignorance of those who even now make the same claim, most modern parents provide the scientific and rational explanation of where the world came from, or at least send their children to the Web, an encyclopaedia, or the library.

There was a time, though, when the question of where the world came from was very difficult to answer. When religious explanations were becoming less and less credible, but scientific explanations had not become completely established, parents had to say – if they wanted to speak with integrity – “I don’t know where the world came from.”

By openly expressing their lack of certainty, parents not only acted with honesty and integrity, but also stimulated their children to pursue a truth that was admittedly absent from their world.

Alas, we suffer similar difficulties today, but about a far more important topic. The religious basis for ethics has fallen away from us, and we lack any credible or accepted theory to replace it. For a time, patriotism and allegiance to culture had some power to convince children that their elders knew something objective about ethics, but as government and military corruption have become increasingly evident, allegiance to a country, a state or a military ethos has become an increasingly fragile basis for ethical absolutes. Even our cherished theories about the virtues of democracy have come under increasing pressure, as gargantuan governments continue to separate themselves from the wishes of their citizens and act in a virtual “state of nature.”

Religious explanations of virtue have failed not just because we no longer believe in God, but also because it is now completely self-evident that when most people refer to “truth,” they are really referring to culture.

== Culture ==
Think about a father in a Muslim country. When his child asks him: “Daddy, what is goodness?” he will generally answer: “To obey Allah, and obey His Prophet.” Why is that his answer? Is it because he has had direct experience with the Prophet, wrote the holy books himself, and has a deep understanding of morality direct from the original creator? If he had grown up alone on a desert island, would his answer be the same?

Of course not. He is merely repeating what was told to him as a child.

However, there is much more to it than that.

This Muslim father knows that his child is going to have to survive – and hopefully flourish – in a Muslim society. If he tells his child that he does not know what is right and wrong, not only will he lose his moral authority in the eyes of his child, but he will also be setting his child up for endless conflicts with everyone else in his society.

In other words, if everyone else lies to their children, what are the costs – social, romantic, economic and so on – of telling your children the truth?

My neighbour has four lovely children – the other day, his son came and showed me a drawing he’d made, a decent representation of Jesus Christ sitting on a rock and praying to the heavens. In all innocence, he asked me what I thought of the picture. Naturally, I knew that his father had told him that Jesus Christ was a real and living man-god who came back from the dead, floated up to heaven, and will free him of sin if he telepathically communicates his love to this ghost. This is no more or less horrifying than any other cult of guilt and control.

But – what could I say to this child? Could I say that this was a very good drawing of a fictional character? Could I tell him that it was an excellent representation of a fairy tale? Could I see the pain and surprise in his eyes? Could I imagine the conversation that he would later have with his father, asking why the nice man next door told him that Jesus Christ was a fictional character? Could I imagine the coldness that would then descend upon the cordial relations between our two houses? Could I imagine his father telling all of his children to stay away from the nice man next door, who wants to take God away from them? Could I stomach the chilled looks that I would receive every time I saw his family for the next few decades..?

I did take the path of least resistance, but did not lie to the child. I told him that I thought the picture was well drawn, and asked him what he thought about it.

Telling the truth is not an easy thing.

We can very easily see how parents in other cultures simply repeat cultural norms to their children as if those cultural norms were objective truth. Japanese parents teach their children obedience and filial piety; Catholic parents teach their children to drink the blood of their god; Muslim parents teach their children that a man who married a six-year-old girl – and consummated that marriage when she was nine – is the paragon of moral virtue; Western parents teach their children that democracy is the highest ideal; North Korean parents teach their children that the dictator who rules their lives is a sort of secular deity who loves them.

The list goes on and on. Virtually every parent in the world believes that she is teaching her child the truth, when she is merely inflicting what may be politely called cultural mythologies on her child.

We lie to our children, all the while telling them that lying is wrong.

We command our children to think for themselves, all the while repeating the most prejudicial absurdities as if they were objective facts.
We tell our children to be good, but we have no idea what goodness really is.

We tell our children that conformity is wrong<ref>“If everyone jumped off the Empire State building, would you jump too?”</ref> but at the same time we are complete slaves to the historical inertia of prior prejudices.

== Too Harsh? ==
I have often been accused of being too harsh on parents. “Parents do the best they can under difficult circumstances; you cannot judge the practical instructions of parents according to some abstract and absolute philosophical standard. My parents were not philosophers – they were simply telling me the truth that they believed, that they thought was accurate.”

The wonderful thing about applying philosophical concepts to our own lives is that theories are very easy to test. Discussing a philosophical theory about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire is a largely theoretical exercise, since we cannot go back in time and test it.
Theories about our families, however, are very easy to test, assuming that we have access to the relevant family members.

It is my firm belief that most human beings are absolutely brilliant. I have come to this conclusion after decades of studying philosophy and having the most amazing conversations with countless people. I am now certain that parents know exactly what they are doing – and a relatively simple test can prove this to the satisfaction of any rational person.

=== A Practical Exercise ===
Sit down with your parents and ask them what the capital of Madagascar is – or some other piece of trivia that they are unlikely to know. They will very likely smile, shake their heads and say, “I don’t know.” They will not avoid the question. They will be more than happy to help you look it up. It will be a trivial fact-finding interaction.

After you have established what the capital of Madagascar is, ask them: “What is goodness?”

I absolutely guarantee you that there will be an instant chill in the room – there will be an enormous amount of tension, and your parents – and probably you – will feel a very strong desire to change the subject, or drop the question.

Why is that? Why is it that when you ask your parents to explain what goodness is, the tension in the room spikes dramatically?

Well, for the same reason that Socrates was introduced to a grim libation called hemlock.

There is terror in the face of the question “What is goodness?” because authority figures claim the right to tell us what to do based on their superior knowledge. If we decide to learn karate, we submit ourselves to the judgement and instruction of somebody who is an expert in karate. If we become ill, we submit our judgement to a doctor, an expert in the field. In other words, when we lack knowledge, we defer to those who claim greater knowledge.

Our parents claimed the right to instruct us on good and bad based on their great knowledge of ethics, not based on their power as parents. Our fathers did not say to us: “Obey me or I will beat you.” Although that terrible sentence might have come out of their mouths at some point, the basis of their ethics was that we owed them obedience as a just debt, and thus could be punished for failing to provide it. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is a staple of moral instruction the world over, both religious and secular. However, the honour that we are supposed to bestow upon our parents must be based upon their superior knowledge and practice of virtue – otherwise the word “honour” would make no sense. If we were thrown in jail, we would obey the prison guards because they held power over us, not because we “honoured” them. If a mugger presses a knife to our ribs, we hand him our wallet – obey his wishes – not because we honour him, but because he has the power to harm us.

By using the word “honour,” parents are claiming that we owe them allegiance due to their superior knowledge and practice of virtue.

Currently, the foundational “ethic” of the family – the entire basis for the authority of adults – is that parents know right from wrong, and children do not. Metaphorically, the parents are the doctors, and the children are the patients. Parents claim the authority to tell their children what to do for the same reason that doctors claim the authority to tell their patients what to do – the superior knowledge of the former, and the relative ignorance of the latter.

If you are unwell, and put yourself in the care of a doctor, and follow his instructions, but find that you do not get better – but in fact seem to get worse – it would be wise to sit down with that doctor and review his abilities – particularly if you cannot change physicians for some reason. Since following his instructions is making you worse, you must ask: “Why should I follow your instructions?”

It would be logical to begin by asking the doctor to confirm his actual credentials. Then, you might continue by asking what his definition of health is, to make sure that you were both on the same page. Then, you would continue to drill down to more specific questions about the nature of your illness, the nature of his knowledge of the human body, and his understanding of your ailments and the methodology by which he came up with your cure.

This is the conversation that you must have with your parents regarding the nature of virtue and their knowledge of it. Your parents were the moral doctors of your being while you were growing up – if, as an adult, you are happy and healthy, full of joy and engaged in deep and meaningful relationships, it is still worthwhile to examine the knowledge of your parents, since you may have children in time, and will yourself become a “doctor” to them.

If, however, you are not happy and fulfilled as an adult, then it is essential that you examine your parents’ ethical knowledge. If your health regimen has been established by a quack who has no idea what he is doing, you will never be healthy as long as you follow his instructions, since one can never randomly arrive at the truth.

If a madman passes himself off as a doctor, when a patient asks for his credentials, he will smile, spread his hands, and say, “Well of course I don’t have any!” His openness about his lack of knowledge and credentials establishes his relative innocence.

However, when the patient asks for a doctor’s credentials, if the doctor evades the question, or becomes hostile, or dismissive, then clearly the “doctor” is fully aware of what he is doing at some level. A man who commits a murder in a police station may claim insanity; a man who murders in secret and then hides the body has the capacity for rationality, if not virtue, and thus cannot claim to be mad.

The fact that your parents will do almost anything to avoid the question “What is goodness?” is the most revealing piece of knowledge that you can possess. It is the fact that blows the cage of culture wide open. It is the horrifying knowledge that will set you free.

You will not just benefit from examining your parents. You can also sit down with your priest, and examine him with regards to the nature of the existence of God.<ref>This is a useful conversation to have with religious parents as well.</ref> If you are persistent, and do your research in advance, you will very quickly discover that your priest also has no certain knowledge about the existence of God – and will become very uncomfortable and/or aggressive if you persist, which you should.

Is it wrong for a priest to say that he only believes in God because he “has a feeling”? In terms of truth, not exactly – in terms of integrity, absolutely.

The fundamental problem is not that the priest claims the emotional irrationality of “faith” as his justification for his belief in God, but rather that the existence of God was presented to you as an objective fact, and also that you were not allowed the same criteria for “knowledge.”

These two facets of the falsehoods you were told as a child are essential to your liberation as an adult.

== Fiction as Facts ==
When you were a child, you did not have the ability to objectively validate the commandments of those who had power over you. Your susceptibility was a great temptation to those who would rather be believed than be right. All power tends to corrupt, and the power that parents have over their children is the greatest power in the world.

A child is biologically predisposed to trust and obey his parents – this has great utility, insofar as parents will often tell their children not to eat poisonous berries, pull hot frying pans off the stove, or run around all day outside without sunscreen on. The requirements of survival tend to discourage endless “trial and error.”

When parents instruct their children, they can either present that instruction as conditional, or absolute. Conditional instructions – do not hit your brother except in self-defence – tend to lead to endless additional questions, and quickly reveal the parents’ lack of knowledge. As the child continues to ask what exactly defines self-defence, whether pre-emptive strikes are allowable, whether teasing can be considered aggression and so on, the fuzzy areas innate to all systems of ethics quickly come into view.

As these fuzzy areas become clearer, parents fear once more the loss of moral authority. However, the fact that certain areas of ethics are harder to define than others does not mean that ethics as a whole is a purely subjective discipline. In biology, the classification of very similar species tends to be fuzzy as well – at least before the discovery of DNA – but that does not mean that biology is a purely subjective science. Water can never be perfectly pure, but that does not mean that bottled water is indistinguishable from seawater.

Due to their desire for simple and absolute moral commandments, parents spend enormous amounts of energy continually herding their children away from the “cliff edges” of ethical complexities. They deploy a wide variety of distractive and abusive tactics to achieve this end – and all these tactics are designed to convince the child that his parents possess absolute knowledge of ethical matters.

However, as children grow – particularly into the teenage years – a certain danger begins to arise. The children, formerly compliant,<ref>At least from the “terrible twos” through the latency period.</ref> begin to suspect that their parents’ “knowledge” is little more than a form of hypocritical bullying. They begin to see the true conformity of their parents with regards to culture, and really begin to understand that what was presented to them as objective fact was in reality subjective opinion.

This causes great confusion and resentment, because teenagers instinctually grasp the true corruption of their parents.

A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.

Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A “doctor” who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.

Recognising the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognises the value of facts. Using the credibility of “truth” to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.

Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.

Children have no such defences.

=== Do As I Say, Not As I Do… ===
The second major hypocrisy involved in presenting subjective opinion as absolute fact is that parents reserve this power only for themselves – and self-righteously punish children for doing exactly the same thing.

Take the question of going to church. Religious parents tell their children that they must go to church. When the children ask why, they are told, “Because God exists, and He loves you,” or other such nonsense. In other words, parents command their children with reference to objective absolutes. Children are absolutely not allowed to say, “I don’t want to go to church because I don’t feel like it.”

Fast-forward a decade or so. The child – now a teenager – sits down with his parents and asks: “Why do you believe in God?”

If he is persistent and knowledgeable, he will quickly corner his parents into admitting that they believe in God because of “faith.” In other words, they have no proof that God exists, but believe in God because they feel like it – since no matter how emotionally compelling faith is, it remains in essence a feeling that contradicts reason and evidence.

However, when that teenager was a child, he was never allowed to make decisions because he just felt like it. He was not allowed to stay home from church because he didn’t feel like going. He was always sent to school despite his preference for staying home at times. His feelings did not create truth, or establish objectively valid criteria for action.

When he used exactly the same methodology that his parents used, he was called disobedient, wrong, sinful, wilful, immoral, stubborn and a thousand other pejoratives. For his parents, acting on the primacy of feeling is praised as an absolute and objective virtue. For him, acting on the primacy of feeling is condemned as an absolute and objective vice.

==== Conformity ====
As the child grows up, his tendency to want to “merge with the herd” is criticised as an immoral weakness. Any susceptibility to fashion trends, linguistic ticks, prized possessions, general sexual habits or any other form of “group-think” is opposed by his parents on supposedly objective and moral grounds.

Again – generally in the teenage years – the child begins to realise that his parents do not actually oppose group-think or conformity on principle, but only attack competing conformities. If a son begins to run with a wild gang, his parents will criticise him on the grounds of conformity, but it is not conformity that they object to, but conformity with a gang they disapprove of, rather than with a group they approve of.

And it gets even worse than that.

The reason that the parents dislike the child’s new gang is because the parents fear disapproval from their own gang. If the son of religious parents starts hanging out with a group of atheists, his parents will criticise him for his mindless conformity, and pointless rebellion – but only because they fear being attacked, criticised or undermined by their own religious peers. In other words, they effectively tell their son: “You should not be susceptible to the disapproval of your peers, because we are susceptible to the disapproval of our peers.”

== Is Ignorance Hypocrisy? ==
The argument is often made that parents are not aware of all the complexities of their own hypocrisies, and thus are not morally responsible for their inconsistencies.

Fortunately, there is no need for us to rely on mere theory to establish the truth of this proposition.

If I tell you to take the highway to get to your destination, and it turns out that this takes you in the exact opposite direction, what would be a rational response if I were truly ignorant of the fact that I was giving you really bad directions?

Well, I would first insist that they were the correct directions, since I genuinely believe that they are. However, when you sat me down with a map and pointed out exactly why my directions were so bad, I would see the truth, apologise profusely, and openly promise never to give out bad directions again – and buy a whole bunch of maps to boot, and spend some significant amount of time studying them.

However, if I got angry the moment that you brought up that I had sent you in the wrong direction, and refused to look at any maps, and refused to admit that I was wrong, and kept changing the subject, and kept distracting you with emotional tricks, and got more and more upset, and refused to tell you how I came up with my directions – and ended up storming out of the room, you may be unsure of many things, but you would not be unsure of one thing at least.

You would no longer imagine that I was ever interested in giving good directions.

In the realm of the parent-child relationship, this realisation comes as a profound and terrible shock. This realisation lands like a nuclear blast over a shanty town, radiating out in waves of destruction, smashing down the assumptions you have about all of your existing relationships.

The moment you realise that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians – your elders in general – only used morality to control you, to subjugate you – as a tool of abuse – your life will never be the same again.

The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture – it reveals the awful “cult” in culture.

A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough – how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?

A fraud is still better than a sadist.

What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children – who respect the power of virtue – and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?

In films, terrorists almost invariably kidnap the wife or child of the hero in order to enforce his compliance with their wishes. His virtues – love and loyalty – are thus turned into the service of evil. The better he is, the worse he must act. The more he loves virtue, the more he is controlled by evil.

And thus do the best become the worst.

And thus are children raised.

And this was your instruction.

== Reluctance ==
We instinctively shy away from confronting the moral void at the core of our relationships – and, fundamentally, the moral void at the core of our relationship with ourselves.

There is a simple and terrible reason for our reluctance to confront this emptiness.

Societies are generally built upon mythologies – in fact, a society can be accurately defined as a group of people who all share the same mythology.

I use the term “mythology” here because I want to ease you into the idea of social fictions, and the degree to which they distort your relationship to yourself and others – and thus your relationship to reality.

There are two major disciplines, which help us dispel the corrosive cobwebs of social fictions and reach through them to grasp reality. The first is theoretical; the second is practical.

The first discipline is logic, which is the process of organising our thoughts in a systematic and non-contradictory manner. The second is science, which is the testing of logical theories against empirical observations. The union of these two disciplines is philosophy, which is in its fundamentals the testing of theories of knowledge against both logic and empirical observation.

Logic will tell you that two plus two equals four; science will verify that placing two rocks next to two other rocks will result in an aggregation of four rocks.

But it is philosophy that tells us that logic plus empirical testability are both key requirements to the establishment of the truth. It is philosophy that specifically rejects the primacy of faith, or the primacy of emotion, or the primacy of authority, or the primacy of age, or the primacy of preference, or the primacy of biology – or any of the other foolish and exploitive mechanisms that human beings have used as substitutes for logic and evidence in order to inflict “truth” on the helpless.

Philosophy is the opposite of mythology. Or, more accurately, truth is the opposite of falsehood.

We are, all of us, deeply aware of the deficiencies of our beliefs. The basic knowledge that our beliefs are mere prejudices, inflicted on us by parents and teachers, is a fact that, deep down, we are all perfectly aware of. The amount of energy that we all put into pretending otherwise is staggering, and debilitating. There is a reason that depression is one of the most prevalent forms of illness.

The contradiction at the core of social mythology is that these cultural falsehoods are always presented as objective and absolute truths.
Americans, for instance, are famously proud of their country, and the beliefs that they have inherited from the Enlightenment philosophers and the Founding Fathers. This is a very strange notion when you examine it.

The average American just happened to be born in America – it is a mere accident, not something earned. The average American takes pride in his cultural heritage, which he did not invent, and which was taught to him by others, who also did not invent it. Believing that you are virtuous because you were born in a particular country is like believing that you are an excellent businessman because you inherited a lot of money, or that you are a good person because you happen to be tall.

The average American has no idea of the philosophical premises underpinning the ideal of a constitutionally limited government. The average American enthusiastically supports a government that is hundreds of times more oppressive and brutal than the British government from which his ancestors fought to free themselves. The average American enthusiastically celebrates Independence Day, despite the fact that, when his country was founded, slavery was protected, and basic rights for women and children were denied.

In other words, the average American blindly praises his own culture and history because he is taught to praise it, not because he has any rational understanding of its actual merits and deficiencies.

This is not to say that America is not a better country than, for instance, Syria. It is, and I am glad not to be living in Syria. However, the methodology for transmitting value from parent to child remains the same in both countries. The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

The average American considers himself superior to the average Muslim, because he believes to some degree in the separation of church and state, supports limited democracy and the rights of women, and respects certain aspects of the free market. He believes that these are good values to hold, and criticises Muslims for not holding the same values.

The sad fact is that while specific beliefs vary from culture to culture, the methodology of belief in all cultures is identical. The simple fact is that if the average American had been born to Muslim parents in Syria, he would be exactly the same as the average Syrian Muslim. He would be no more likely to value the separation of church and state than the average Western woman born in Manhattan would be likely to wear a burka.

Patriotism is the hijacking of the achievements of others – usually ancestors – and taking ego gratification in them as if they were one’s own. This involves a curious distortion of logic that is blindingly obvious when seen.

Either someone is a good person because he was born in America, or because he conforms to objective standards of goodness. You either like a car because it is a Buick, or Buicks are good cars because they get excellent economy.

If someone is good because he was born in America, then clearly he cannot judge a man born in Saudi Arabia as deficient in any way, either morally or culturally. The essence of aristocracy – the eternal plague of mankind – is the belief that we are “born into” superiority; that our “excellence” is somehow innate. However, if an American is “superior” to a Saudi, then that superiority is not earned. If Bob were born in Saudi Arabia rather than America, he would be an “inferior” Muslim rather than a “superior” Christian or American. Thus Bob’s superiority – or lack thereof – has nothing to do with his personal choices, but is rather defined by the accidents of geography and birth. Either Bob claims to be better due to geography, which is impossible – or due to his own personal virtue, in which case geography has nothing to do with it.

Both Americans and Muslims are simply reproducing what they are told – what is inflicted on them through emotional punishments when they are children – and calling it “morality.” This is exactly the same as a child who is force-fed, who then calls being overweight “moral,” while the child next door is underfed, and then calls being skinny “moral.” Sports fans are the same way – the closest franchise is just somehow the “best.”

Basically, culture is the compulsion to call whatever surrounds you “moral.” If you live in the mountains, it is moral to live in the mountains. If you were taught to swim, then swimming is moral. If you were not taught to swim, then swimming is immoral. If you were taught to cover your legs, then baring your legs is “immodest.” If you were taught to uncover your legs, then covering them up is “prudish.” If you were taught to fold the flag a certain way, then folding the flag any other way is “disrespectful.”

When I was six, I was sent to an English boarding school. One of the rules there was that I was had to wear garters around my socks to keep them up, especially in church. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I entered the church without my garters on, I was being “disrespectful to God.” This didn’t make much sense to me; I argued that God made my legs, and men made garters, and I was sure that God would appreciate looking at his own creation rather than something that men made.

Naturally, my objections were also framed as immoral talk-back – I was being “disrespectful” to the headmaster.

I am sure you get the idea.

Everything that surrounds you is framed in terms of ethics, because framing things in terms of ethics works. If you can get a child to believe that something is right or wrong, you control that child’s mind, his body, his allegiance, his very being. Moral arguments have a power that is unmatched in any other form of human interaction. In terms of social control, moral arguments are the ultimate WMDs.

== Susceptibility ==
As children, we are highly susceptible to moral arguments because we so desperately want to be good, and because we know that “morality” is synonymous with praise, while “immorality” is synonymous with punishment. When our parents, priests and teachers tell us that something is “good,” what they are really saying is: “You will not be punished for this – and you may even be rewarded!” Conversely, when we are told that something is “bad,” what we are really being told is that we will be punished for doing – or even contemplating – whatever it is.

We are not punished for being bad. “Being bad” is invented so that we may be “justly” punished.

Those in authority are continually driven to hide their perpetual use of power over their victims. Our teachers do not like to openly tell us that they will hurt us if we disobey them, because that is too naked a display of abusive power.

It is also a highly inefficient form of control.

If your teacher were to say, “If you lie to me, I will punish you” – and just left it at that, then lying would always be more or less a calculated risk – and being punished for lying would have no more moral significance than being fouled while playing basketball. If a teacher is facing a class of thirty students, each of whom is calculating whether or not he can get away with a lie, then clearly, as more of them lie, each lie becomes that much harder to catch, just as it is harder to figure out exactly who is talking when twenty children are chatting rather than just two.

Furthermore, if a parent openly uses brute force to compel compliance from a child, then the pattern-making centres in our brains will immediately extract a principle out of that interaction. Within our minds, every decision and interaction is involuntarily extrapolated into a principle. If our parents compel our compliance with brute force, then the principle that we extract from that interaction is: “Whoever has the power should use it abusively to control everyone else.” Or: “Whoever has the most power should inflict his will on whoever has the least power.”

Due to the natural decay of organic life, this is a rather dangerous principle for parents to establish. If we think of a single mother raising two boys, we can easily see that creating a principle called “brute force rules” – while perhaps having a certain practical utility when they are young – will scarcely serve her well when her boys hit their teenage years, and become physically far stronger than she is. Even fathers will reach dotage and physical weakness relative to their sons, and thus will scarcely benefit from applying the principle of “whoever has the most power should forcefully subjugate whoever has the least power.”

Thus the use of force must be forever shrouded in the fog of “ethics.” This is a very tricky business logically, because what is required is a simultaneous appeal to both a principle, and a person – which is directly contradictory.

=== The Contradictory Appeal ===
When your father says, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” he is invoking both a principle and a person. The principle is that all mothers and fathers are honourable, and so deserving of respect. The person that he is invoking is himself and your mother specifically – thy mother and father.

Logically, this makes no sense.

Saying, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is like saying, “Honour all the women who are my wife.” If I must honour all women, then I will automatically honour your wife, since she is a woman. If I must honour your wife, then there is no point saying that I must honour her as a woman, because that would involve honouring all women again. It’s one or the other.

If you must honour the category “father” and “mother,” then you must respect all mothers and fathers equally. Showing preference for your own parents would be unjust.

If you must show preference for your own mother and father, then the category of “mother” and “father” is irrelevant. It must be for some other reason, then, that you should honour these particular individuals.

If you should bestow honour upon your mother and father as individuals, and for no objective principle, then what is really being demanded is not honour, but obedience towards individuals in the guise of honour as a principle.

This basic logical contradiction, while complicated to discuss syllogistically, is something that every child instinctually understands. When our mother demands that we respect her, do we not feel contempt, frustration and despair? Demanding respect is like demanding love, or hijacking an aircraft. It is commanding a destination, rather than respecting the free choices of individuals.

We cannot imagine someone hijacking an aircraft on its way to Vladivostok and demanding, “Take me to Vladivostok!” People hijack planes because the plane is not going where they want to go.

=== Efficient Control ===
If, however, through intimidation, the distinction between the principle and the person can be blurred and buried, a far more efficient mechanism of control is achieved. If a child – or a citizen – can be taught to obey a person as if that person were a universal principle, the foundations of hegemonic dictatorship, whether in the family, the church, the school or the state, are firmly established. If a child’s mind can be taught to obey the whims of an individual to the same degree that the child’s body obeys the absolutes of gravity, then near-perfect control can be established.

Of course, this control incurs a terrible cost – and a terrible risk. The cost accrues to both the parent and the child, as is the case in all corrupt interactions. By using false and inconsistent principles to teach the child to obey a person rather than a principle, the child’s ability to extract principles from interactions is crippled. Such children inevitably grow up to repeat destructive patterns in relationships, seemingly without any ability to learn from their mistakes. How could they learn from their mistakes? They have been taught as a principle to obey individuals – how can they then conceivably extract generalised principles from the behaviour of those individuals? That would be like hoping that water will flow uphill. Expecting such people to extract productive principles from their interactions with others is like expecting a medieval monk who believes that the world follows the whims of the gods to discover the theory of relativity – or even the scientific method itself.

For the parents, the cost is a perpetual and growing fear of the intelligence and perceptiveness of their children, which manifests in a variety of ways, such as genial blankness, corrosive contempt, yawning indifference or fussy irritability.

For our parents – and our elders in general – the modern world has virtually guaranteed that the gig is up.

The antidote to false morality is a multiplicity of false moralities. The antidote to irrational prejudice is more irrational prejudices.
It is by being able to see the world as a whole that we can finally set ourselves free.

== Detonating Mythology ==
If we were only ever exposed to English, we would not think of it as “English,” just as “language.” The need to differentiate English as a language only arises when we come into contact with other languages.

Similarly, if we are only exposed to our own mythologies, we do not think of them as mythologies, but rather as the truth. If we only know our own god, then we can refer to this fiction as “God” – this is a universe away from saying “a god,” – or, more accurately “our god.”

Deep down, each of us knows that our faith in our fragile fairy tales can only be sustained if we constantly steer clear of competing fairy tales. This tends to cripple our capacity for empathy – we must in our hearts ridicule the foolish beliefs of other cultures, and never take the terrifying leap of trying to see our own culture through their eyes.

The fear and hatred that so often mars the relations between different cultural groups does not arise out of ignorance, but rather out of knowledge. Christians feel uneasy around Muslims – and Muslims feel uneasy around Christians – not because they are different, but because they are the same. Two adulterous women who know each others’ secrets will, if forced to sit together for lunch, have a very uncomfortable time – not because they know too little about each other, but rather because they know too much.

The only way that mythology can sustainably dominate generation after generation is by pretending that it is not mythology, but reality.

To help clarify this, consider the following thought experiment.

Imagine that the water in a sink has consciousness, and is sentient. Now imagine that I pour this water into a variety of glass containers, each of a different shape. The water, since it is sentient, would doubtless congratulate itself on its individuality. Since it would be unable to see the glass that surrounded it, contained it, and shaped its very form, it would honestly believe that its true physical shape was a mug, jar, test tube, or martini glass.

The sentient water filling the test tube would look at all the funny glass shapes around it and be enormously amused. “Do they not know how ridiculous they seem from the outside? Can they really imagine that that is their true shape? It’s madness!” it would chortle, pressed up against the glass of its own conceptual prison. And the water in the martini glass would look at all the other containers – including the test tube – and say exactly the same thing.

And this, really, is the state of all of the different cultures around the world. Each of us is poured into a clear glass container, which we believe represents the truth, which provides us with a shape and an identity that we mistake for “human nature.” And this can work relatively well – at least until we begin to catch sight of all the other glass containers surrounding us.

For a time, we will endeavour to maintain the illusion that only other water is contained in an obvious glass container – not us! However, there are those among us who can break free from the glass cage of culture – we stand outside such containers, and from our vantage point, the differences in the sizes and shapes of the containers are practically irrelevant.

The size and shape of your prison is not important. The fact that you are in a prison is.

The knowledge that you are in a prison does not have to be learned. It only has to be accepted. It is not something that you do not know. At a very deep level, you are perfectly aware that what you call the truth is just the magical physics of invisible fairy tales.

How do I know this?

As with every idea in this book, there is no need to take my word for anything. You can easily discover your deep understanding of this fact with a few simple experiments.

As I have mentioned before, you can sit down with your parents and ask them about goodness. You can sit down with your friends and tell them that you are afraid that you are living in a fiction that is sapping your joy and independence. You can go to a mosque and ask if you can observe. You can put yourself in someone else’s “glass container” and see how you feel.

Try it. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine sitting down with your parents to ask them about goodness, or having a drink with your friends and talking about social mythologies. Do you feel nervous? Do you feel a vague and uneasy fluttering in your stomach at the very thought of such honesty and curiosity?

Why? Why do you feel afraid? Why have you never asked such questions? Who told you that such questions were not allowed? Were you ever punished for asking these questions in the past? Is there any law against asking such questions?

What will happen when you ask such questions?

You already know the answer. That is why you are afraid.

It is not cowardice that makes you afraid. It is wisdom that makes you afraid.

Because you have every reason to be afraid.

== Mythological Love ==
Our whole lives, we are surrounded by people who claim to love us. Our parents perpetually claim to be motivated by what is best for us. Our teachers eternally proclaim that their sole motivation is to help us learn. Our priests voice concern for our eternal souls, and extended family members endlessly announce their devotion to the clan.

When people claim to love us, it is not unreasonable to expect that they know us. If you tell me that you love Thailand, but it turns out that you have never been there, and know very little about it, then it is hard for me to believe that you really love it. If I say that I love opera, but I never listen to opera – well, you get the general idea!

If I say that I love you, but I know little about your real thoughts and feelings, and have no idea what your true values are – or perhaps even what your favourite books, authors or films are – then it should logically be very hard for you to believe me.

This is certainly the case in my family. My mother, brother and father made extravagant claims about their love for me. However, when I finally sat down and asked each of them to recount a few facts about me – some of my preferences and values – I got a perfect tripod of “thousand yard stares.”

So, I thought, if people who know almost nothing about me claim to love me, then either they are lying, or I do not understand love at all.
I will not go into details about my theories of love here, other than to say that, in my view, love is our involuntary response to virtue, just as well-being is our involuntary response to a healthy lifestyle.<ref>Our affection for our babies is more attachment than mature love, since it is shared throughout the animal kingdom.</ref>

Virtue is a complicated subject, but I am sure we can agree that virtue must involve some basics that are commonly understood, such as courage, integrity, benevolence, empathy, wisdom and so on.

If this is the case, it cannot be possible to love people that we know very little about. If love requires virtue, then we cannot love perfect strangers, because we know nothing about their virtues. Love depends both on another person’s virtue, and our knowledge of it – and it grows in proportion to that virtue and knowledge, if we are virtuous ourselves.

Throughout my childhood, whenever I expressed a personal thought, desire, wish, preference or feeling, I was generally met with eye rolling, incomprehension, avoidance or, all too often, outright scorn. These various “rejection tactics” were completely co-joined with expressions of love and devotion. When I started getting into philosophy – through the works of Ayn Rand originally – my growing love of wisdom was dismissed out of hand as some sort of psychological dysfunction.

Since my family knew precious little about my virtues – and what they did know they disliked – then we could not all be virtuous. If they were virtuous, and disliked my values, then my values could not be virtuous. If I was virtuous, and they disliked my values, then they could not be virtuous.

And so I set about trying to create an “ethical map” of my family.

It was the most frightening thing I have ever done. The amount of emotional resistance that I felt towards the idea of trying to rationally and morally understand my family was staggering – it literally felt as if I were sprinting directly off a cliff.

Why was it so terrifying?

Well, because I knew that they were lying. I knew that they were lying about loving me, and I knew that, by claiming to be confused about whether they loved me, I was lying as well – and to myself, which is the worst of all falsehoods.

== Love: The Word versus the Deed ==
Saying the word “success” is far easier than actually achieving success. Mouthing the word “love” is far easier than actually loving someone for the right reasons – and being loved for the right reasons.

If we do not have any standards for being loved, then laziness and indifference will inevitably result. If I have a job where I work from home, and no one ever checks up on me, and I never have to produce anything, and I get paid no matter what, and I cannot get fired, how long will it be before my work ethic decays? Days? Weeks? Certainly not months.

One of the most important questions to ask in any examination of the truth is “compared to what?” For instance, if I say I love you, implicit in that statement is a preference for you over others. In other words, compared to others, I prefer you. We prefer honesty compared to falsehood, satiation to hunger, warmth to cold and so on.

It is not logically valid to equate the word “love” with “family.” The word “family” is a mere description of a biological commonality – it makes no more sense to equate “love” with “family” than it does to equate “love” with “mammal.” Thus the word “love” must mean a preference compared to – what?

It is impossible to have any standards for love if we do not have any standards for truth. Since being honest is better than lying, and courage is better than cowardice, and truth is better than falsehood, we cannot have honesty and courage unless we are standing for something that is true. Thus when we say that we “love” someone, what we really mean is that his actions are consistent, compared to a rational standard of virtue. In the same way, when I say that somebody is “healthy,” what I really mean is that his organs are functioning consistently, relative to a rational standard of well-being.

Thus love is not a subjective preference, or a biological commonality, but our involuntary response to virtuous actions on the part of another.

If we truly understand this definition, then it is easy for us to see that a society that does not know truth cannot ever know love.

If nothing is true, virtue is impossible.

If virtue is impossible, then we are forced to pretend to be virtuous, through patriotism, clan loyalties, cultural pride, superstitious conformities and other such amoral counterfeits.

If virtue is impossible, then love is impossible, because actions cannot be compared to any objective standard of goodness. If love is impossible, we are forced to resort to sentimentality, or the shallow show and outward appearance of love.

Thus it can be seen that any set of principles that interferes with our ability to know and understand the truth hollows us out, undermining and destroying our capacity for love. False principles, illusions, fantasies and mythologies separate us from each other, from virtue, from love, from the true connections that we can achieve only through reality.

In fantasy, there is only isolation and pretence. Mythology is, fundamentally, loneliness and emptiness.

== Imagination versus Fantasy ==
At this point, I think it would be well worth highlighting the differences between imagination and fantasy, because many people, on hearing my criticisms of mythology, think that they are now not supposed to enjoy Star Wars.

Imagination is a creative faculty that is deeply rooted in reality. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a mere species of intangible wish fulfilment It took Tolkien decades of study and writing to produce “The Lord of the Rings” – and each part of that novel was rationally consistent with the whole. That is an example of imagination. If I laze about daydreaming that one day I will make a fortune by writing a better novel than “The Lord of the Rings” – but never actually set pen to paper – that is an example of fantasy. Imagination produced the theory of relativity, not fantasising about someday winning a Nobel Prize.

Daydreams that are never converted into action are the ultimate procrastination. Imagining a wonderful future that you never have to act to achieve prevents you from achieving a wonderful future.

In the same way, imagining that you know the truth when you do not prevents you from ever learning the truth. Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of knowledge. If you are going the wrong way, but do not doubt your direction, you will never turn around.

As Socrates noted more than two thousand years ago, doubt is the midwife of curiosity, and curiosity breeds wisdom.

Fantasy is the opposite of doubt. Mythology provides instant answers when people do not even know what the questions are. In the Middle Ages, when someone asked “Where did the world come from?” he was told: “God made it.” This effectively precluded the necessity of asking the more relevant question: “What is the world?”

Because religious people believed they knew where the world came from, there was little point asking what the world was. Because there was little point asking what the world was, they never learned where the world came from.

Fantasy is a circle of nothingness, forever eating its own tail.

== Defining Love ==
If people fantasise that they know what is true, then they inevitably stop searching for the truth. If I am driving home, I stop driving when I get there. If people fantasise that they know what goodness is, they inevitably stop trying to understand goodness.

And, most importantly, if people fantasise that they already are good, they stop trying to become good. If you want a baby, and you believe that you are pregnant, you stop trying to get pregnant.

The question – which we already know the answer to – thus remains: why do people who claim to love us never tell us what love is?

If I am an accomplished mathematician, and my child comes to me and asks me about the times tables, it would be rude and churlish of me to dismiss his questions. If I go to my mother, who for thirty years has claimed to love me, and ask her what love is, why is it that she refuses to answer my question? Why does my brother roll his eyes and change the subject whenever I ask him what it is that he loves about me? Why does my father claim to love me, while continually rejecting everything that I hold precious?

Why does everyone around me perpetually use words that they refuse to define? Are they full of a knowledge that they cannot express? That is not a good reason for refusing to discuss the topics. A novelist who writes instinctually would not logically be hostile if asked about the source of his inspiration. He may not come up with a perfect answer, but there would be no reason to perpetually avoid the subject.

Unless…

Unless, of course, he is a plagiarist.

== What We Know ==
This is the knowledge that we have, but hate and fear.

We know that the people who claim to love us know precious little about us, and nothing at all about love.

We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to create obligations within us.

We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to control us.

And they know it too.

It is completely obvious that they know this, because they know exactly which topics to avoid. A counterfeiter will not mind if you ask him what the capital of Madagascar is. A counterfeiter will mind, however, if you ask him whether you can check the authenticity of his money. Why is this the one topic that he will try to avoid at all costs?

Because he knows that his currency is fake.

And he also knows that if you find that out, he can no longer use it to rob you blind.

== Obligations ==
If I own a store, and take counterfeit money from a con man, but do not know that it is counterfeit, then I am obligated to hand over what he has “bought.”

In the same way, if I believe that I am loved – even when I am not loved – I am to a degree honour-bound to return that love. If my mother says that she loves me, and she is virtuous, then she must love me because I am virtuous. Since she is herself virtuous, then I “owe” her love as a matter of justice, just as I owe trust to someone who consistently behaves in a trustworthy manner.

Thus when somebody tries to convince you that they love you, they’re actually attempting to create an obligation in you. If I try to convince you that I am a trustworthy person, it is because I want all the benefits of being treated as if I were a trustworthy person. If I am in fact a trustworthy person, then I must understand the nature of trust – at least at some level – and thus I must know that it cannot be demanded, but must be earned. Since earning trust is harder than just demanding trust, I must know the real value of trust, otherwise I would not have taken the trouble to earn it through consistent behaviour – I would have just demanded it and skipped all the hard stuff!

If you demand trust, you are demanding the unearned, which indicates that you do not believe you can earn it. Thus anyone who demands trust is automatically untrustworthy.

Why do people demand trust?

To rob others.

If I want to borrow money from you, and I demand that you trust me, it’s because I am not trustworthy, and will be unlikely to pay you back.
In other words, I want to steal your money, and put you in my power.

It’s the same with love.

== Love and Virtue ==
If I am virtuous, then virtuous people will regard me with at least respect, if not love. Corrupt or evil people may regard me with a certain respect, but they will certainly not love me.

Thus being virtuous and refusing to demand love from anyone is the best way to find other virtuous people. If you are virtuous and undemanding, then other virtuous people will naturally gravitate towards you. Virtue that does not impose itself on others is like a magnet for goodness, and repels corruption.

The practical result of true virtue is fundamental self-protection.

If my stockbroker consistently gets me thirty percent return on my investments, is there any amount of money that I will not give him, other than what I need to live? Of course not! Because I know I will always get back more than I give.

It’s the same with real love.

If I am virtuous, then I will inevitably feel positively inclined towards other virtuous people – and the more virtuous they are, the more I will love them. My energy, time and resources will be at their disposal, because I know that I will not be exploited, and that they will reciprocate my generosity.

If you and I have lent money to each other over the years, and have always paid each other back, then the next time you come to me for a loan, it would be unjust for me to tell you that I will not lend you anything because I do not think you will pay me back. Your continued and perpetual honesty towards me in financial matters has created an obligation in me towards you. This does not mean that I must lend you money whenever you ask for it, but I cannot justly claim as my reason for not lending you money a belief that you will not pay me back.

In the same way, if you have been my wife for twenty years, and I have never been unfaithful, if a woman calls and then hangs up, it would be unjust for you to immediately accuse me of infidelity.

A central tactic for creating artificial and unjust obligations in others is to demand their positive opinion, without being willing to earn it. The most effective way to do this is to offer a positive opinion, which has not been earned – to claim to love others.

If, over the past twenty years, I have rarely paid back any money I have borrowed from you, it is perfectly reasonable to refuse me an additional loan. I may then get angry, and call you unfair, and demand that you treat me as if I were trustworthy, but it would scarcely be virtuous for you to comply with my wishes. Indeed, it would be dishonest and unjust for you to ignore my untrustworthiness, because you would be acting as if there was no difference between someone who pays back loans, and someone who does not.

When we act in a virtuous manner towards others, we are creating a reservoir of goodwill that we can draw upon, just as when we put our savings into a bank. A man can act imperfectly and still be loved, just as a man can eat an occasional candy bar and still be healthy, but there is a general requirement for consistency in any discipline. I could probably hit a home run in a major-league ballpark once every thousand pitches, but that would scarcely make me a professional baseball player!

If I act in a trustworthy manner, I do not have to ask you to trust me – and in fact, I would be very unwise to do so. Either you will trust me voluntarily, which means that you respect honourable and consistent behaviour, and justly respond to those who do good, or you will not trust me voluntarily, which means that you do not respond in a just manner to trustworthy behaviour, and thus cannot be trusted yourself.

If, on the other hand, I come up to you and demand that you trust me, I am engaged in a complex calculation of counterfeiting and plunder.
The first thing I am trying to do is establish whether or not you know anything about trust. The second thing is to figure out your level of confidence and self-esteem. The third thing is figure out if you know anything about integrity.

An attacker will always try to find the weakest chink in your armour. If I demand trust from you, and you agree to provide it – without any prior evidence – then I know that you do not know anything about trust. Similarly, if you do not require that your trust be earned, then I know that you lack confidence and self-esteem. If you are willing to treat me as if I were trustworthy when I am not trustworthy, then it is clear to me you know very little about integrity.

This tells me all I need to know about your history. This tells me that you were never treated with respect as a child, and that you were never taught to judge people according to independent standards, and that every time you tried to stand up for yourself, your family attacked you.
In other words, I will know that you are easy prey.

I cannot create an obligation in you unless you accept that I have treated you justly in the past. As in all things, it is far easier to convince a weak person that you have treated him justly, than it is to actually treat people in a just and consistent manner. If I can convince you that I have treated you justly in the past, then you “owe” me trust and respect in the present.

== “Love” as Predation ==
Imagine that we are brothers, and one day you awake from a coma to see me sitting by your bed. After some small talk, I tell you that you owe me one thousand dollars, which you borrowed from me the day of your accident. I tell you that because I am a kind brother, and you are in the hospital, you do not have to pay me back the thousand dollars – I would just like you to remember it, so that the next time I need to borrow one thousand dollars, you will lend it to me.

You might look in the pockets of the jeans you wore the day of your accident, and you might look around your apartment to see if there was one thousand dollars lying around, but there would be no real way to prove that I had not lent you the money. You would either have to call me a liar – an accusation for which you have no certain proof – or you would feel substantially more obligated to lend me money in the future.

If you call me a liar, I will get angry. If you accept the obligation without ever finding the one thousand dollars, you will feel resentful. Either way, our relationship is harmed – and by telling you about the one thousand dollars, I have voluntarily introduced a complication and a suspicion into our relationship, which is scarcely loving, just or benevolent.

This is the kind of brinkmanship and deception that goes on all the time in relationships – particularly in families.

When our parents tell us that they love us, they are in fact demanding that we provide for them. They are basically telling us that they have lent us one thousand dollars – even if we cannot remember it – and thus we owe them trust in the future, if not one thousand dollars in the present!

In other words, our parents spend an enormous amount of energy convincing us that they “love” us in order to create artificial obligations within us. In doing so, they take a terrible risk – and force us to make an even more terrible choice.

== Brinkmanship ==
When somebody tells you that they love you, it is either a statement of genuine regard, based on mutual virtue, or it is an exploitive and unjust demand for your money, time, resources, or approval.

There is very little in between.

Either love is real, and a true joy, or love is false, and the most corrupt and cowardly form of theft that can be imagined.

If love is real, then it inflicts no unjust obligations. If love is real, then it is freely given without demands. If a good man gives you his love, and you do not reciprocate it, then he just realises that he was mistaken, learns a little, and moves on. If a woman tells you that she loves you, and then resents any hesitation or lack of reciprocation you display, then she does not love you, but is using the word “love” as a kind of hook, to entrap you into doing what she wants, to your own detriment.

How can you possibly know whether the love that somebody expresses towards you is genuine or not?

It’s very, very simple.

When it is genuine, you feel it.

What happens, though, when a parent demands love from us?

Well, we must either submit to this demand, and pretend to respond in kind, or we must confront her on her manipulation – thus threatening the entire basis of the relationship.

Would someone who truly loves us ever put us in this terrible position?

=== Society and Religion ===
The principle of inflicting a good opinion in order to create an unjust obligation occurs at a social level, as well as at a personal level. Soldiers are supposed to have died “protecting us,” which creates an obligation for us to support the troops. The mere act of being born in a country creates a lifelong obligation to pay taxes at the point of a gun, in order to receive services that we never directly asked for. John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country,” is another way of saying, “One of us is going to get screwed in this interaction, and it ain’t gonna be me!”

The same thing occurs in the realm of religion, of course, as well. Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, you will be punished if you do not obey, Hell is the destination of unbelievers etc. etc. etc.

All of these emotional tricks are designed to create an obligation in you that would not exist in any reasonable universe.

“Sacrifice,” in other words, is merely demand in disguise.

== Unconscious? ==
All of these substantial criticisms rest on the premise that people do actually know what love really is, and merely counterfeit it for the sake of personal gain – just as any moral criticism of a counterfeiter rests on the premise that he actually does know what money is, and copies it for the sake of personal gain.

Naturally, it is hard to imagine that those around us are constantly striving to inflict artificial obligations on us through appeal to a fantastical kind of social mythology. When you think of your sweet, white-haired old mother, who sacrificed everything for you, what could it mean to condemn her for failing to be able to perfectly define the nature and properties of love, a question that baffles even great philosophers?

Well of course it would be grossly unfair to ask the average person to accurately define the true nature of love, just as it would be ridiculous – not to mention dangerous – to grab the average man on the street and ask him to perform your appendectomy.

It certainly is unfair to judge people by standards that they can scarcely be aware of. However, it is not at all unfair to judge people according to the standards that they themselves have set. I cannot alone determine at what price you will sell me your car – but if you yourself put the price in the window, it is not unreasonable for me to expect you to honour it.

Thus when people use the word “love,” they are “putting the price in the window.” Love of course is considered to be a feeling of high regard for someone, and is either based upon the virtues or characteristics of the loved person, or it is not. If love is not based on the characteristics of the loved person, then it must be based on the willpower of the person who loves him or her.

If love is based on the willpower of the person who is “doing the loving,” then it must be considered virtuous to love so altruistically. If it is not virtuous to love so altruistically, then there is nothing beneficial or positive in the interaction, since neither the person loving nor the person being loved possesses any positive characteristics. We might as well define obsessive stalking as “love.”

If it is “good” for Person A to love Person B despite Person B’s lack of lovable qualities, then this “good action” is either a universal principle, or a merely personal preference. If I say that ice cream is “good,” I do not mean that ice cream acts with virtue, courage and integrity. If I say that a particular action is “good,” then it must be good for more than one person, if it is to rise above merely personal preference. However, if it is “good” to love someone who has no lovable qualities, then an instant paradox is created.

If I have no lovable qualities, then I do not possess “goodness,” since goodness is a lovable quality. If it is “good” to love someone despite an absence of lovable qualities, then by definition I am incapable of loving someone, since I lack goodness. In this way, two opposing moral rules are created, which cannot be valid. Person A does “good” by loving Person B, who is incapable of goodness. Person B can then only enable Person A’s “goodness” by receiving without giving – thus what is good for Person A is not good for Person B.

Again, though this can be complicated to examine syllogistically, it is an argument that adult children of a co-dependent parent have continuously. If I see my mother perpetually sacrificing everything for my father, I will continually ask her that if sacrificing everything for your spouse is good, then why does my father not sacrifice everything for her? Why is such sacrifice only ever good for her? Why does my father get off scot-free?

It cannot be considered “good” to love someone who lacks lovable qualities. Love, then, is a form of payment for virtue.

I must confess that I understood this at the age of thirteen, when I was a very shallow young man. In school, word got around that I was going to ask a girl to a dance. My criteria, sadly, was solely based on physical attractiveness. When my classmates cornered me and pestered me to reveal whom I was going to ask out, I finally mentioned the girl’s name, and was greeted with rather shocked silence. This girl, while admittedly attractive, was considered rather coarse and unintelligent.

“Why would you ask her?” a friend demanded.

“Uh, because of her… personality,” I stammered, convincing no one.

Why was it that, even at such a tender age, I felt the need to invent virtue as the basis for my desire? Would it have been wrong to say, “She’s kinda purdy!” and be satisfied with that?

And the looks in the faces of the people around me were very interesting. It was not so much that they knew that I was lying – that much was obvious. It is more that they knew why I was lying – and they actually had some sympathy for that, I think.

They knew that I was lying because it is easier to make up “good” reasons for wanting the wrong thing than to actually want the right thing.
And this lesson we have been well taught by our teachers - but I will get into that later.

When I was about eleven, I stole some money from my brother to buy a book. He suspected me of the theft, and spent a good deal of time and energy cross-examining me as to where I’d gotten the money to afford the book. He never could prove that I stole the money, and I stonewalled and evaded with fairly decent ability.

There are three things that I remember very strongly from that long afternoon.
#I was not troubled fundamentally about stealing, but only worried about getting caught.
#If someone had asked me if stealing were wrong, I would have said “yes” – and mean it.
#I was not worried about that blatant contradiction.

In other words, I knew that stealing was wrong, but that knowledge was a mere abstraction, like knowing how many moons Jupiter has, or the name of the drummer for Led Zeppelin. I believed that stealing was wrong – but what that really meant was that I knew that I would get punished if I did not say that stealing was wrong. So I said it aloud, like a magical spell that wards off punishment, like any pagan.

It was similar to how I would chant out my times tables, before I had any real understanding of arithmetic. The sentence was not “Yes, I know that stealing is wrong, but I wanted a book!” It was even less related than that: “Stealing is wrong, and I wanted a book.” Just two facts, a principle and a desire, not even orbiting one another…

So did I know that stealing is wrong? Sure, I think I did, but for me, “wrong” just meant, “disapproved of.” By this time, I had lived in a number of different countries and classes, and I knew that “wrong” was not objective, because “disapproved of” varied so enormously from place to place. And obviously I myself “approved of” taking the money from my brother, because I did it. So there was my little “approval,” and lots of other people’s “disapproval,” and I thought:well, if other people get to disapprove of things that I prefer, then surely I have the right to approve of things that they do not prefer.

Logical, you may say. Amoral, but logical. And I would have to agree.

But the important issue is that I knew the rules, then I broke the rules by applying them to myself, and so I just made up new rules. This is, I believe, far more common than is generally admitted.

And so we come to the fundamental question: how responsible are we in the face of our own hypocrisies?

=== The Open Cage… ===
I’d like you to imagine a man standing in the middle of a large meadow. You spend some time watching this man, and it doesn’t take you very long to notice that he paces back and forth in a small square, about ten feet on either side. That’s all. Just ten feet.

After a few hours of watching him do this, you walk up to him. When you reach forward to shake his hand, however, your fingers are burned by a strong electrical shock from an invisible barrier.

Startled – and hurt – you cry out. The man looks up.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I just ran into this invisible wall which gave me a hell of a shock!” you cry.

He frowns. “I didn’t see anything.”

You blink. “Really? You’ve never heard or seen or felt this invisible barrier?”

He shakes his head slowly. “What invisible barrier?”

“The one that surrounds you – the one that keeps you penned in this little ten foot square!”

“What little ten foot square?” he demands. “There’s no little ten foot square! I can go wherever the hell I want!”

“No you can’t!”

“Who the hell are you to tell me where I can and cannot go? I decide that!”

“I’m not telling you where you can and cannot go – I’m just telling you what you are actually doing!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Well, I’ve been watching you for the past few hours, and you’re standing in the middle of this great big meadow, and yet all you do is pace back and forth ten feet.”

“I can go anywhere I damn well please!” the man repeats angrily.

“You say that, but all you do is pace around and around in a little ten foot square! If you can go anywhere you please, why don’t you just try taking one extra step?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he growls. “Now get the hell off my damn property!”

“Wait – I can show you!” You reach down and pick up some grass. You throw it towards the man. A few feet away from his face, the blades of grass burst into flame and evaporate. You do this several times, proving definitively that there is in fact an invisible force field that surrounds him, roughly ten feet by ten feet.

“Do you see?” you ask eagerly. “Do you see that you are in an invisible cage?”

“Get the hell off my property, you madman!” he cries, shaking with rage.

“But you must know that you are in an invisible cage,” you cry out. “You must know that, because you never try to go outside these walls. You must have at one time tried to break free of this cage, and were burned by the electric shock, which is why you never take more than a few steps before turning around! Don’t you see?”

He pulls out a gun, screams that he has a principle of shooting trespassers, and, quite sensibly, you run away.

This is the great paradox of attempting to teach people what they already know. Everybody claims complete freedom, but paces back and forth, trapped in a little square. Everyone is surrounded by the invisible cages of culture and mythology, and denies it completely. The evidence of these cages is very clear, because people always turn back just before they hit them. But then they deny that these cages exist.

Everybody acts as if they are perfectly free, and perfectly enslaved at the same time. Nobody admits to being in a prison, but everyone shuffles around in an invisible ten by ten cell.

In the same way, everyone tells you that they are free, but in fact everyone is trapped in little tiny cells of allowable conversation. Everybody tells you they love you, but strenuously avoids talking about what love is, or what about you they love.

Everyone tells you to be good, but they have no idea what goodness is – and will savage you for even having the temerity to ask the question.
Everybody talks about the truth, but the real truth is that nobody can talk about the truth – what it is, how it is defined, how it is verified, and its value.

== Responsibility ==
If the man in the meadow were put into his cage when he was a toddler, he would have discovered the limits of his confinement – painfully – when he was very young. It is entirely conceivable that he would end up just avoiding his invisible prison bars, to retain his illusion of freedom, and repress the pain of imprisonment. If you cannot escape your prison, then you might as well imagine that you’re free.

The man is not responsible for being put in the cage when he was a toddler, and he is not responsible for his resulting repression, and he is not responsible for not testing the bars of his cage, but instead turning away before he touches them.

There are two things, however, that he is responsible for.

The first thing that he is responsible for denying is clear and tangible evidence that contradicts his belief. There are two primary pieces of evidence: the grass that bursts into flame, and the fact that although he says he is free, he never takes more than a few steps in any direction before turning around.

The second thing that he is responsible for is shutting down the conversation when it makes him uncomfortable.

The essence of wisdom is learning the value of “staying in the conversation,” even when it makes you uncomfortable.

Especially when it makes you uncomfortable.

== Falsehood and the Conversation ==
The most important thing in life is not to lie to other people – honesty is the most fundamental virtue. Now, just about every time a philosopher brings up the virtue of honesty, a blizzard of questions blocks his progress – questions designed to find the fuzzy areas at the limits of ethical behaviour, such as “Is it okay to lie if someone holds a gun to your head and demands to know where your wife is so that he can kill her?”

This is all very interesting, but absolutely irrelevant to the world as it is.

In the world as it is, we are so far from being able to tell the truth to each other that focusing on the fuzzy areas of practical honesty is like asking a man who stumbles into an emergency room clutching his own severed arm if he needs a manicure. Or, to take another medical analogy, I view philosophers as essential doctors in the middle of a terrible plague. All around us, people are writhing and dying, and we must work as hard as we can to save as many people as we can – with the full knowledge that very few people will make it. Most modern philosophers, however, are sitting in the midst of all this suffering, and debating what the best course of action should be if a patient presents with a heart attack, diabetes, and a hangnail, and is struck by lightning while being examined.

My response to that is: when we have reached a world that is so healthy that the once-a-century problems are the most important things that we can deal with, we shall scarcely need philosophy at all!

Thus let us roll up our sleeves, and try to deal with the plague that is devouring us now, and leave the improbable problems to a future happier time.

The reason that the man in the invisible cage above is to blame for his actions is that he was lying to you.

When you began to point the truth out to him, he felt uncomfortable. At first, he seemed genuinely baffled – whether that was a ruse or not, we cannot tell. Then, as the evidence began to mount up, both logically and empirically, he began to get hostile.

Was he lying? Of course he was.

He was lying because he did not tell you that he was feeling uncomfortable, but rather began jabbering about trespassing, cursing, and ended up pulling out a gun.

Was this honest? No. Was this man aware that he was feeling increasingly uncomfortable? Of course. Did he honestly express his discomfort? No. He evaded his own discomfort by attacking you.

As an example, when I sat down with my brother, after I had decided to stop seeing my mother, he presented to me the following argument:

“Stef, you should see mother because if you don’t see her, then she is exercising control over your choices. If you allow the fact that you dislike her to control your actions, she has won, and you have lost an essential freedom.”

“So,” I replied, “if I understand you correctly, you are saying that I should see people that I like because I like them, and I should see people that I dislike because otherwise they will have power over me. In other words, there is no one that I should ever refuse to see.”
As usual, he rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“But let me tell you what bothers me about this family,” I continued. “I strongly feel that I am never allowed to have any real preferences. I mean, I am allowed to have preferences in my own way, but nobody ever respects those preferences and changes their actions. You would prefer that I see mother, and so you are trying to get me to change my actions based on your preferences. However, at the same time, you tell me that my preferences are meaningless, in terms of whom I see. But how can your preferences require a change in my actions, but my preferences should require no changes in my actions?”

Sadly, inevitably, the conversation was over at that point.

It was clear to me even at the time that my brother was intensely uncomfortable with my questions. He telegraphed all the usual signals – pursed lips, eye rolling, tight shrugs and endless frowns. I felt a very strong resistance as I ploughed on, and I asked my brother if he felt uncomfortable. He said that he did not.

This was, of course, the key moment in our interaction. If he had been honest with me, and told me that he felt uncomfortable, we could have talked about his discomfort, and the ways in which that discomfort might have been affecting his position.

By telling me that I was doing something wrong, when what was actually happening was that my choices were causing him discomfort, my brother was lying to me. He was, essentially, trying to manage his own discomfort by inflicting moral commandments upon me. He tried to appeal to my self-interest based on a vague “higher standard,” and when that failed, he disapproved of my “resistance.” My decision not to see our mother any more created great anxiety in him, because it opened up the possibility of choice, where before there had only been an absolute.

This was an essential aspect of our interaction. I think that I will have had a long life if I live to be a hundred years old. If, however, if turns out that technology can now allow us to live to be two hundred years old, a hundred years will no longer seem like such a long life. Where there is no possibility of reaching two hundred years of age, we do not feel anxious if we fail to reach it. If there is no possibility of not seeing your own mother, then we feel far less anxious if we continue to see her, even if, deep down, we do not want to.

However, the moment that somebody says: “I am no longer going to see my mother,” this creates great anxiety within us, because a possibility now exists that deep down we really want which formerly we thought was impossible.

When I made my decision, my brother had two choices about how to best manage his anxiety. He could examine that anxiety and try to understand its source – or, he could attempt to reduce his anxiety by manipulating me into seeing our mother again.

When choice enters into our lives, where formerly we felt there were only absolutes, we feel anxiety, because deep down we know that that choice always existed, but we have been told that it was wrong to think about that choice. Emotionally, this leads us back to our early traumas, through which “culture” was inflicted upon us – and thus to a deep and bitter criticism of our parents and teachers – bringing us right up against the invisible electric fence of mythological punishment.

We really, really do not ever want to go there.

If somebody breaks out of prison, you can either try to break out of prison yourself, or you can help the guards get him back into prison. The tipping point of the decision is what you decide to do with your own anxiety. If you decide to deal with your anxiety as an internal state, related to your core beliefs, your history, your false allegiances to false virtues, then you will be catapulted through the entire cavalcade of growth that is the inevitable result of deciding to stop using others to manage your emotions.

It is a sad reality that, for most people, their prison doesn’t feel like a prison until somebody tries to break out of it. The conclusion they leap to is that the person who has broken out of prison is the one who actually turned it into a prison – by the very act of breaking out of it! It’s madness, of course, but all too common.

When I sat down with my mother, about eight years ago, a very similar interaction occurred, just as you would expect. And, just as you would expect, she was much more efficient than my brother, because she taught him.

The fundamental conversation went this way:

I said: “Mum, I feel that you don’t listen to me.”

My mother replied: “Don’t be silly – of course I listen to you!”

Do you really need any help figuring out the blatant contradiction in this interaction?

I doubt it.

== Exploitation ==
If I am sick, and I need you to donate a kidney to me, I have four general choices:
#I can tell you that I would like you to donate a kidney to me, with no expectation that you must do so.
#I can decide not to ask you for a kidney.
#I can tell you that I really need you to donate a kidney, and you should do it because I want you to.
#I can tell you that it is immoral to refuse to donate a kidney to me, and thus you are ethically obligated to give me your kidney, just as you are ethically obligated to pay back a loan.

In the first case, I am simply expressing my true and honest desire for your kidney. I am not manipulating you. I am not bullying you. I am telling you what I want. My request is not a demand – and my request, fundamentally, is not for your kidney, but for you to understand that I would like your kidney.

This is a crucial difference, which is so easily overlooked. Saying, “I would like your kidney,” is not saying, “Give me your kidney!” Saying, “I would like to be an astronaut,” is not saying, “Make me an astronaut!”

Either I am free to express my thoughts and feelings to you, or I am not. If I am free to do so, then of course I must be free to express what I would prefer you to do, if that is what I think.

If you interpret my preferences as commandments that you must comply with, then you will naturally prefer that I never express a preference. If you hate the taste of ice cream, but every time I said, “I like ice cream,” you had to eat a bowl, you would obviously prefer that I not say “I like ice cream” any more Because my desires enslave you, you must enslave my desires.

The best and most terrible way to enslave another human being is to interpret his desires as commandments. If, every time I express my preferences, you interpret them as commandments, then you must inevitably be led to controlling, minimising, ignoring or attacking my preferences.

In other words, if my desires are commandments, then my preferences are attacks upon you.

And the only antidote to this is curiosity.

== Curiosity ==
The opposite of tyranny is curiosity. The opposite of ignorance is curiosity. The opposite of manipulation is curiosity.
The opposite of immaturity is curiosity, because to be curious is to be wise.

What is the most logical and mature response to the statement: “I would like you to give me your kidney.”?

Is it:
#“Sure, here you go – I even iced it for you.”
#Blank stare.
#“Don’t ask me, it makes me uncomfortable.”
#“How about those Mets?”
#“I told you not to play rugby, you never listen to me, I can’t believe you would have the balls to ask me, how selfish and manipulative can you get?”
#“Tell me more.”

If we really understand the nature of the statement, which is “I have a feeling called ‘I would prefer for you to give me your kidney’,” then together we can examine the nature of that feeling. If I am standing at a bus stop, and a woman next to me says, “Feels like rain,” it would be quite logical for me to ask, if I was curious, “What does that feel like?” Arguing about whether rain was imminent or not would be illogical, because the woman did not say, “It’s about to rain.” What she said was, “Feels like rain,” which is quite different. It is a statement of an inner experience, not an outward prediction, command or expectation.

If I say to you, “I dreamt about an elephant last night,” could you logically disagree with me? You might not be particularly interested in my dream, but it would make precious little sense to dispute my statement. Either I am telling the truth, or I am not. If I am telling the truth, there is nothing to argue about – if I am not, there’s still nothing to argue about, because you will never have one single shred of evidence that I am lying.

Thus when I say to you, “I would like you to give me your kidney,” it’s the first three words that are important, not the last four. But everyone focuses on the last four, considers them a bullying demand, and thus must spend the rest of their mortal existence managing and controlling the first three.

Statements of preference are just statements of inner experience, and if we care about the person who is expressing them, we will be curious about her inner experience.

Thus, to extrapolate to something slightly more generic than kidneys, if you are doing something that bothers me, I have four general choices:
#I can tell you that I am bothered by what you’re doing, with no expectation that you must change your behaviour.
#I can leave the situation.
#I can tell you that what you’re doing bothers me, and that you should stop it because it bothers me.
#I can tell you that what you’re doing is immoral, and you should stop it because it’s wrong.

Of course, if people in general were mature and wise, they would mostly choose what was behind door number one – occasionally, they would leave through door number two for a brief period if they were upset, but they would never open doors three and four.

However, the world is neither wise nor mature, and so children quickly learn that when adults are upset or anxious, it is the children’s behaviour that must always change. If my mother is anxious about me dating, the “solution” is for me not to date. If my father will be embarrassed by my absence from church, I must go to church. If my mother will feel embarrassed if I do not kiss my smelly old grandmother, it’s pucker time! If my mother will feel mortified if I snatch a toy from another child, the solution is for me to “play nicely.”<ref>Of course I really should not snatch toys; the problem is that my mother is not curious why I do so, but merely controls the symptoms, instead of working to understand the cause.</ref>

== Attack ==
When I was fourteen or so, I took a summer school course, desperate to get out of the mental gulag of public school as quickly as humanly possible. I had a brittle and belligerent male teacher, who demanded that we show up on the dot at eight-thirty in the morning, but then would have us sit and read a textbook for the first thirty to forty minutes of the class. He also showed really boring documentaries, spoke in a monotone, and was completely obsessed with JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

Occasionally, I would get very sleepy, and I would put my head down on my desk for a few minutes. I never fell asleep, but it certainly could have looked that way.

After a couple of weeks of classes, I got up to do a presentation on slavery. Just before I began, this teacher held up his hand and ordered everyone to put their heads down on their desk.

All the other children were pretty confused, as you can imagine – as was I. After a few minutes of bullying and ordering, all the children in the room put their heads down on their desks. My face was very pale, and I was alarmed, to say the least.

When everyone’s head was down, the teacher turned and literally screamed at me: “Do you see how it feels? Do you see how it feels when you’re trying to teach people something, and they put their heads down on their desks? DO YOU SEE HOW IT FEELS? THAT’S RUDE! DON’T DO THAT!” His veins were literally bulging out of his neck.

And then, of course, he demanded that I deliver my presentation.

What was going on here?

The amazing thing about people who abuse children, is that they really have no idea how the children actually see them. I knew that he had all the power, but it really was a very sad spectacle, and I got a very strong impression of a futile, self-loathing and pathetic life. Perhaps they imagine that bullying children makes them look strong, but the degree of contempt that I felt – and feel – towards those who bully the helpless is almost beyond words, and I do not think that I am alone in that. When we think of the radioactive contempt that teenagers often have towards their parents and other authority figures, I think it’s fairly easy to see that bullying children does not generate respect – any more than beating your wife generates love.

Let’s call this teacher Bob, since I have no idea what his name is, after all these years. Clearly, Bob did not feel like a very good teacher, because a good teacher would regard an exhausted student with curiosity. I could be tired because I cannot sleep, or have problems at home, or have a hormonal imbalance, or some other reason that has precious little to do with his teaching ability – or I could be tired because he is a boring teacher.

If Bob shows no curiosity as to why I am tired, then he will never know why. If I am sick, or stressed,<ref>I was working three jobs at this point in my childhood.</ref> he might be able to help me in some way – or at least, he will have established that it is not because he is a boring teacher.

If he finds out that I am tired because he is a boring teacher, then obviously that can be painful, but I have absolutely no doubt that Bob would prefer to be an exciting teacher than a boring one. If he had invested the time to try and figure out – with me – why I was tired, then he might have been able to learn how to become a more exciting teacher, which would have been in line with his own values, and so made him happier.
The truth of the matter, of course, as we have seen above, is that, deep down, Bob was absolutely convinced that he was a terrible teacher. When I put my head down on my desk, it confirmed his worst fears, which he violently rejected.

When we understand the power of mythology, it is clear how little Bob understood about what I was doing, and what I was communicating.
When I put my head down on my desk, I was not saying, “Bob, you are a terrible teacher.” I was not saying, “I am putting my head down on my desk to defy your authority.” I was not saying, “I am putting my head down on my desk because I am a rude and selfish individual who cares nothing for anyone else’s feelings.”

When I put my head down on my desk, I was only saying: “I am tired.”

Everything else was just mythology – paranoid and vicious fairy tales.

Everything else was Bob’s invention, and he invented everything else in order to strenuously avoid being curious.

Why? Why was he so terrified of curiosity?

It’s simple.

The reason that we are not curious is that we already know the answers, and we do not like them.

== Wisdom and Pain ==
Pain is our body’s way of telling us what we need to deal with, of helping us prioritise our actions relative to health. Our body does not report on organs that are functioning well, but the moment that a tooth gets infected, we know all about it!

In other words, pain tells us what we need to do. If our tooth hurts, we need to go to a dentist. Pain informs us of the problems we need to solve.

If we think of our life before anaesthetics, it’s easy to understand that we usually had to accept an increase in pain in order to become healthier. An infected tooth had to be pulled out. Nowadays, we sometimes have to go through the pain of chemotherapy in order to treat cancer.

This is the challenge of pain – we do not like it, but often have to accept a temporary increase of it in order to become healthier.

If I break my leg, it really hurts – that’s why I stop moving it. After my leg has healed, to regain full strength and mobility, I have to endure the pain of physiotherapy.

Injuries can also make us stronger. If I survive a heart attack, I may choose to lose weight, eat better, exercise and so on – I may in fact be healthier than if I had never had a heart attack. Similarly, if I break my leg, my leg can end up stronger, as a result of the exercise required to restore strength and mobility. Losing a tooth can generate a desire for better oral hygiene.

There are several key differences between physical pain and psychological pain, however, which you really need to understand if you want to become healthier and happier in the long run.

The first and most important difference is that psychological pain can be transferred from one person to another. If my tooth hurts, I cannot transfer my toothache to you – but quite the opposite is true for psychological pain, at least in the short run.

If I feel anxiety about what you are doing, I can temporarily reduce that anxiety by forcing you to change your behaviour, just as I can temporarily reduce the pain of a toothache by taking painkillers – the difference being that when I take painkillers, you do not feel my toothache.

The transfer of psychological pain almost always occurs in a hierarchical relationship, such as parent-child, boss-employee, a dominant/submissive marriage and so on. Helplessness and dependence – real for children, fantasied for adults – are required to be on the receiving end of this kind of parasitical emotional exploitation.

This is the main reason why hegemonic or hierarchical power relations exist. We do not throw our garbage into a dump because the dump just happens to be there – the dump only exists because we need to throw our garbage somewhere. In the same way, we do not exploit people because they’re helpless; we make them helpless in order to exploit them.

Bob did not end up abusing children because he had power as a teacher – he sought power as a teacher in order to abuse children.
Power does not create corruption; the desire to corrupt creates power.

When we are in an agony of psychological distress, it is utterly counter-intuitive to want to feel more of that agony – just as it is counter-intuitive to want to pull out a tooth that already hurts, or start chemotherapy when you do not feel sick.

Yet that is precisely what is required, if we wish to become healthy.

If I choose not to go to physiotherapy after my broken leg heals, I am the only one who has to live with the resulting weakness and lack of mobility. If I choose to manage my anxiety by attacking the helpless, however, I gain temporary relief from my discomfort only by inflicting my distress on others.

And this is how the entire system reproduces itself.

In essence, by attempting to humiliate me so horrendously, Bob was attempting to infect me with the virus of abuse. Because he was not mature or wise enough to take ownership for his own emotions, he inevitably believed that I was the source of his anxiety. Since I was “inflicting” anxiety upon him, I was acting in a “hostile” manner, just as if I were injecting him with a poison – and thus his attack on me was a twisted form of self-defence.

Furthermore, by inflicting his “humiliation” on me, Bob was demanding that I have empathy for his feelings – but if empathy is a value, why would he not have empathy for my exhaustion?

Without a doubt, Bob had been ignored and repeatedly humiliated as a child, and forced to comply with the irrational whims of those who held power over him. The natural pattern-making habits of his brain thus created a universal commandment: “You must obey those in power!” – or, more accurately: “Disobeying those in power will cause you to be attacked and humiliated.”

There are three major components to the psychological agony that results from the establishment of this principle.

The first is the shame and embarrassment that results from being humiliated.

The second is the horror of being trapped in the power of those who act abusively.

The third is the rage that results from being told that such abuse is actually virtuous – “This is for your own good!”

When we are abused as children, we are put into a terrible predicament, because we are utterly dependent on our abusers. A form of the “Stockholm syndrome” sets in, and we force ourselves to “respect” those who abuse us. This is an entirely sensible survival strategy, because the horror of knowing that we will be under the abusive control of our parents for years to come would be too great for us to bear. Also, since we are punished for not showing respect, it is easier just to “respect” them rather than continually have to pretend to – which they will doubtless see through, and punish.

Furthermore, since abuse is always cloaked with self-righteous moral justifications,<ref>“It is morally wrong to disobey me!”</ref> we also experience an existential horror, because we know that our parents are using moral terms – and our own desire for goodness – to humiliate, control and bully us. In other words, they use goodness in the service of evil, which is the worst corruption of all.

Thus we are inevitably led to invert rational moral standards – bullying the helpless inevitably becomes virtue.

== Absolutes ==
We can choose not to eat, but we cannot erase our body’s need for food. We can choose to jump off a cliff, but we cannot choose to defy gravity.

We can pretend that lies are true, and that vices are virtues, but we cannot turn lies into truth, or vices into virtues.

We cannot erase the truth within ourselves; we can only suppress and distort it.

Fundamentally, philosophy is not invention, but excavation; not exploration, but archaeology.

When we are abused as children, as Bob surely was, we desperately try to numb our pain by imagining that our abusers are virtuous. Deep down, we know the truth though, which is why our distortions cause us such agony in the long run.

We can use other people to “manage” our anxieties as surely as we can use drugs and alcohol to “manage” our anxieties.

The disparity between the mythologies we must invent in order to survive our childhoods and the reality we know to be true is the most fundamental source of our depression and anxiety.

In other words, fantasy is the scar tissue of abuse.

When Bob saw me put my head on my desk, I “created” anxiety in him because I was not acting on a premise that he believed to be a moral absolute: “You must respect and obey those in power!” His hysterical reaction to my innocuous doziness resulted not because he believed that I should obey those in power, but because, deep down, he knew that it was in fact immoral to obey those in power – and because he also knew that if someone in power demands obedience, it is because that person is not moral.

In other words, he avoided the pain of his own abuse by pretending that he was not abused – by pretending that his abusers were moral. He did this by transforming the control that was inflicted on him from a practical principle of obedience to a moral standard of perfection.

=== Justification as Prediction ===
Imagine that I live in England, and for decades I have been ranting about immigrants who do not take the time to learn English. “How can you come and live in a place and never take the trouble to learn the language? It’s disrespectful, it’s rude, and it’s cloistered. Anybody who wishes to be a decent citizen must take the trouble to learn the language!”

I publish countless articles on this topic, I make public speeches on it, and end friendships with those who disagree with me.

In other words, I am really committed to this idea.

Then, imagine that I move to Sweden. I live in Sweden for a year, and then come back to England for a visit.

“So, how’s Sweden?” you ask.

“Great!” I reply.

“And how’s your Swedish coming along?”

“Oh, I haven’t learned any Swedish, why would I?”

Would that surprise you? Would you feel that I was being rather hypocritical? Would you feel a strong desire to cross-examine me more closely about my strong and openly professed belief that the inhabitants of a country are morally obligated to learn the language?

If I explain the inconsistency between my beliefs and my actions by saying that it turns out it is very hard to learn a new language, and that it is not really necessary if you live within the confines of an expatriate cultural group – would you feel compelled to point out that this is the exact opposite of the position that I have publicly and vociferously taken for many years?

I imagine that you would suggest it would be appropriate for me to write a follow-up article, repudiating my earlier views, based on my new understanding.

Would my blanket refusal to do any such thing affect your opinion of me?

This is the cycle of abuse.

When we, as children, justify the abuses of our parents in order to survive the situation, we are setting up moral absolutes about the right and proper use of power. “It is moral for those who have power to hurt those who do not have power, in order to protect them, guide them, or ‘toughen them up.’”

This is how we justify and survive the harm done to us.

This is why we so often repeat and re-inflict the harm done to us.

If I were a publicly xenophobic Brit who moved to Sweden, I would be perfectly aware of all the criticisms I would face if I did not try to learn Swedish. I would know that I would either have to learn Swedish – and learn it well – or publicly repudiate all my earlier opinions.

“Flip-flopping” on principles is very humiliating, because everyone who proclaims a truth inevitably claims that that truth is based on reason and evidence. No one puts forward a “truth” claiming it is based on mere unsubstantiated opinion – because then, of course, it would not be the truth.

Thus someone who claims “the truth” always says that this truth is merely derived from reason and evidence – even those who claim “faith” as the basis for their beliefs say that faith provides evidence, and thus it is rational to believe truths based on faith.

If someone who claims a truth later has to completely reverse his position, he can only credibly do so if new evidence arises. For instance, if it turns out that the universe is in fact powered by invisible pixies on treadmills, I will have to revise some of my opinions on reality – but only because new evidence has come to light.

If, however, no new evidence has come to light, then clearly evidence cannot be believably cited as the justification for one’s earlier position. What becomes clear is that one’s earlier position was based on prejudice, but that reason and evidence were cited as justifications.
This is an essential point – and very similar to the ethical and cultural hypocrisies discussed above.

When I cite reason and evidence as the justifications for my beliefs, I am affirming the power of reason and evidence. In other words, I fully accept and respect the primacy of reason and evidence in determining the truth-value of beliefs.

If it turns out that I had no real reason or evidence for my beliefs, then I am engaged in the same kind of terrible hypocrisy perpetrated by those who use moral arguments for immoral ends. I am using reason and evidence to support subjective bigotry.

This hypocrisy lies at the root of my public and private pronouncements regarding truth. If it comes to light that I have been using the values of reason and evidence to promote bigotry and prejudice, then not only have all my prior statements become worse than useless, but I stand revealed as a hypocrite, a fraud and a manipulator.

All my credibility is shot. All my prior statements become examples not of empirical truth, but of rank hypocrisy.

Not good.

This is exactly what happens when we maintain our childhood justifications for our parents’ abuses into adulthood.

If we believe that the abuse of power is moral, we will inevitably be led to abuse power. If I go to Sweden, but do not learn Swedish, then I will have to lie and prevaricate, or pretend that I have learned Swedish, or am about to learn Swedish and so on. Or, I will have to enter the magical land of “this is just somehow different,” which will inevitably require that I substitute aggression for consistency when questioned.
We replicate what we praise. Our justifications guide our lives as surely as train tracks guide a train. The lies we believe today are the lives we will live tomorrow.

The teacher who humiliated me did so because he believed that that’s what those in power must do.

Almost everyone, when faced with the choice of hypocrisy or abuse, chooses abuse.

=== Sadism as Salvation ===
If I go to a doctor because I have made myself sick by smoking, and the doctor prescribes a treatment that causes me pain, my doctor is not cruel, but helpful. The doctor does not seek me out and hurt me because he is sadistic, but rather I must seek out the doctor for a cure because I have hurt myself by smoking. I should not resent the doctor for the pain of his cure, but rather thank him for his ability to help me. The doctor is not responsible for my pain. I am.

A child born in a prison will almost inevitably say: “I don’t obey the prison guards because they are sadists with truncheons, but rather because the prison guards are morally virtuous, and trying to help me.”

There is a terrible cost to this belief, as there is to all fantasies.

If my prison guards hit me with truncheons, I must obey them. If I accept that I obey them because they hit me with truncheons, I feel terribly humiliated and helpless, but retain an accurate assessment of the situation. On the other hand, I can choose to reduce my humiliation by imagining not that I comply because I am hit, but rather that I am hit because I disobey. It is not my non-compliance with the guard’s whims that gets me beaten, but rather my non-compliance with moral virtues. The guards do not beat me because they are sadistic – I am beaten because I am evil. The guards are not responsible for beating me – I am responsible for being beaten. The guards are not trying to humiliate me; they are trying to help me, to make me a better person, just as the doctor is trying to help me by making me healthy again.

Do you see how the agony of moral corruption can be transferred from one person to another?

If my parents beat me not because they are bad, but rather because I am bad, I can retain some sense of honour and control within an abusive and hopeless situation.

If, however, I retain this fantasy after I become an adult – after I gain power over others – then my survival strategy will become exploitive destruction. The equation of abuse with virtue that formerly allowed me to survive now corrupts me. I have become what I originally feared and despised.

Thus, when my actions conflicted with Bob’s belief that it was virtuous to obey those in power, I created great anxiety in him, and triggered his defences, by triggering all his memories of being abused.

I was creating a choice where he believed there was only an absolute. I was also acting in an “immoral” manner, and he had been taught as a child that it is moral to attack someone who is acting in an “immoral” manner.

Thus, to defend his fantasies about his parents’ virtue, to ward off the growing anxiety and horror he felt about the lies he had to invent to survive his own abuse, to crush the freedom that I possessed and which he did not, to legitimise a false moral absolute – and, fundamentally, to both re-create his parents’ abuse, and to be the “bad” person his parents claimed him to be – all in order to justify their abuse – he attacked me.

If I had never understood this, I would very likely have become Bob, and passed along my own abuse.

If I had taken Bob’s abuse personally, I would have absorbed an agony that I would have inevitably inflicted on others, most likely children.

But Bob’s abuse had no more to do with me than my sleepiness had to do with Bob.

He lashed out at me because he knew the truth deep down, but could not accept it.

He tried to humiliate me because, in his own mind, one of us had to be humiliated – and I started it!

He did evil in order to protect the “virtue” of evil.

And it is time for us – all of us, around the world – to stop.

== How To Change ==
I was originally planning for this book to be longer, but as I reached this point in the text, I began to feel a growing anxiety, which was hard for me to understand. I thought it might be because I had started this book without a plan, and was losing my way. As my wife and I reread the book, though, it was clear that it flowed quite well.

Last night, we went for a walk, and discussed the content and form of this book. In just over sixteen months, I have produced over eight hundred podcasts, so it’s not as if I am anywhere close to running out of things to talk about!

However, when you have been immersed in a discipline for a quarter-century, it can be hard to remember what it’s like starting out. I am now quite sure that my anxiety stems from a concern that a longer book would be too hard to digest. When you want to eat a dessert, five pies are not better than one pie.

We will surely speak again, but I think that we have spoken enough for now.

The ideas in this book will change your life if you think about them, and act upon them. The purpose of philosophy is not thought, but action – just as the purpose of medicine is not treatment, but health.

These ideas are in your mind now, and will never go away. You will no more be able to unlearn these truths than you will be able to unlearn that two plus two make four. Thus it is essential that your journey does not stop with reading this book. It is essential that philosophy be a conversation in your life – that you talk about your experience of these ideas with those around you, no matter how terrifying it is.

This book is not a call to meditation, but to action.

In a world full of falsehoods, the truth will isolate you if you do not stay in the conversation.

So – go and live the truth by speaking the truth.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/OTPDF Digital version]
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/OT Audio version]
*[http://www.lulu.com/browse/book_view.php?fCID=1052013 Print version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:On Truth

2010-12-01T06:39:19Z

Anarchei: Created page with content

'''''On Truth: The Tyranny Of Illusion''''' is a book by Stefan Molyneux written in 2007.

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From a short-term, merely practical standpoint, you really do not want to read this book. This book will mess up your life, as you know it. This book will change every single one of your relationships – most importantly, your relationship with yourself. This book will change your life even if you never implement a single one of the proposals it contains. This book will change you even if you disagree with every single idea it puts forward. Even if you put it down right now, this book will have changed your life, because now you know that you are afraid of change.

This book is radioactive and painful – it is only incidentally the kind of radiation and pain that will cure you.

== Relationships ==
There are really only three kinds of relationships in the world. The first kind is the one we all dream of – joyous, mutually beneficial, deep, meaningful, fun, a real pleasure to have and to hold.

This kind of relationship is extraordinarily rare. If this kind of relationship were an animal, it would not even be on the endangered list. It would be by many considered extinct.

The second kind of relationship is mutually beneficial, but not joyous, deep, or meaningful. This is the kind of relationship you have with your grocer, your banker, and perhaps your boss. It is voluntary, defined by an implicit or explicit contract, and can usually be broken or allowed to lapse without guilt, regret or remorse.

This kind of relationship is not uncommon, but also not very important. We do not lose our lives, our happiness or our very souls in the pits of these kinds of relationships. They are, as the saying goes, “dry calculations of mutual utility.” We are not obligated to go to the deathbeds of our bankers; our grocers do not force us to attend church when we do not believe; we rarely get into fights with our bosses about whether or not we should baptise our children.

No, it is the third kind of relationship that we are most concerned with in our lives. It is the third kind of relationship that so often tortures us. It is the third kind of relationship that undermines our joy, integrity and independence.

The first kind of relationship does not involve obligation, but pleasure. There is no need for guilt or manipulation, bullying or control, demands, tears or passive-aggression. We do not need obligation to draw us to that which gives us pleasure, any more than a child needs to be cajoled into eating his candy.

The second kind of relationship does involve obligation, but it is voluntarily chosen, for mutual advantage. We pay our mortgage; the bank gives us a house. The relationship is contractual, and thus does not need guilt or manipulation.

It is the third kind of relationship that this book will focus on.

It is the third kind of relationship that is eating us alive.

== The Third Kind ==
The third kind of relationship has three main components. The first is that it is not chosen; the second is that it involves obligations, and the third is that it is considered moral.

The first and most important aspect of these kinds of relationships is that they are not entered into voluntarily. You are born into them. You do not choose your parents. You do not choose your siblings. You do not choose your extended family. You do not choose your country. You do not choose your culture. You do not choose your government. You do not choose your religion. You do not choose your school. You do not choose your teachers.

Sadly, when you are a child, the list is nearly endless.

You are born into this world without choice, into a familial, social, educational, political and geographical environment that is merely accidental. And for the rest of your life, everyone will try to convince you that you are responsible for this accident.

Your parents decided to have a child – you were in no way involved in the choice, since you did not as yet exist when the decision was made. Even if you were conceived by accident, or adopted, your parents decided to keep you.

Thus your parents’ relationship with you when you were a child was essentially contractual, in the same way that when you buy a dog, you’re obligated to feed it. Naturally, it is preferable – and certainly possible – for your relationship with your parents to be loving, mutually enjoyable, respectful and great fun all around.

But as I said before, this kind of relationship is, sadly, all too rare.

Entire generations of children have grown up with the idea that the act of being born creates an obligation.

This is entirely false, and one of the most destructive myths of mankind.

First, I will tell you what is true. Then I will tell you why it is true. Then I will tell you how to change.

== What Is True ==
It is true that your parents chose to have you. It is true that by making that choice, your parents assumed a voluntary obligation towards you. That obligation consisted of two main parts: the first was physical, the second was moral.

The physical part of that obligation was clothing, food, medical attention, shelter and so on – the base physical requirements. I am not going to spend much time on that in this book, since the vast majority of parents succeed in providing food and shelter for their children – and those who fail in this regard are so obviously deficient that a philosophical book is scarcely required to illuminate their shortcomings.

The moral obligations that your parents assumed by having you were twofold. The first part is more or less understood in society, and consists of all the standard virtues such as educating you, keeping you safe, refraining from physical or emotional abuse and so on.

The second part of your parents’ moral obligation towards you is much more subtle and corrosive. This is the realm of integrity, and it is a great challenge for societies throughout the world.

=== Integrity ===
Integrity can be defined as consistency between reality, ideas and behaviour. Consistency with reality is not telling a child that daddy is “sick” when he is in fact drunk. Consistency with behaviour is not slapping a child for hitting another child. The value of this kind of integrity is also well understood by many, even if imperfectly practised, and we will not deal with it much here either.

It is consistency with ideas that causes the most problems for families – and the most long-term suffering for children throughout their lives.
When you were a child, you were told over and over that certain actions were either good or bad. Telling the truth was good; stealing was bad. Hitting your brother was bad; helping your grandmother was good. Being on time was good; failing to complete chores was bad.

Implicit in all these instructions – moral instructions – was the premise that your parents knew what was right and what was wrong; what was good, and what was bad.

Do you think that was really true? Do you think that your parents knew what was right and wrong when you were a child?

When we tell a child that something is wrong – not just incorrect, but morally wrong – there are really only two possibilities. The first is that we actually know what is right and wrong in general, and we are applying our universal knowledge of right and wrong to a specific action committed by the child.

This is how it is always portrayed to the child. It is almost always the most dangerous lie in the world.

The second possibility is that we are telling our child that his actions are “wrong” for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever.

For instance, we might tell a child that stealing is wrong because:
#We are embarrassed at our child’s actions.
#We are afraid of being judged a poor parent.
#We are afraid that our child’s theft will be discovered.
#We are simply repeating what was told to us.
#We enjoy humiliating our child.
#Correcting our child on “ethics” makes us feel morally superior.
#We want our child to avoid behaviour that we were punished for as children.

... and so on

Assuming they are not terrified, most children, on first receiving moral instructions, will generally respond by asking “why?” Why is stealing wrong? Why is lying wrong? Why is bullying wrong? Why is hitting wrong?

These are all perfectly valid questions, akin to asking why the sky is blue. The problem arises in the fact that parents have no rational answers, but endlessly pretend that they do.

When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.

Since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics. As an atheist, I do not mourn the loss of the illusions of gods and devils, but I am alarmed at the fact that we have not yet admitted that the fall of religion has not provided us an objective and rational moral compass. By failing to admit to the fact that we do not know what we are doing ethically, we are perpetrating a grave moral error on our children.

Basically, we are lying to them about being good.

We tell them that certain things they do are right or wrong – yet we do not tell them that we do not know why those things are right or wrong. If our child asks us why lying is wrong, we can say that it causes people pain – but so does dentistry – or we can say “you don’t like it when someone lies to you” – which would be an incentive to not get caught, not to refrain from lying – and so on. Every answer we come up with leads to more questions and inconsistencies. What do we do then?

Why, then, we must bully them.

This does not mean hitting them or yelling at them – though sadly all too often this is the case – because as parents we have a near-infinity of passive-aggressive tactics such as sighing, acting exasperated, changing the subject, offering them a cookie, taking them for a walk, claiming to be “too busy,” distracting or rejecting them in a million and one ways.

These kinds of innocent questions about morality represent a kind of horror for parents. As parents, we must retain our moral authority over our children – but as citizens of modernity, we have no rational basis for that moral authority. Thus we are forced to lie to our children about being good, and about our knowledge of goodness, which transforms virtue from a rational discipline into a fearful fairy tale.

In the past, when religious mythology was dominant, when children asked “Where does the world come from?” parents could reply that God made it. Despite the superstitious ignorance of those who even now make the same claim, most modern parents provide the scientific and rational explanation of where the world came from, or at least send their children to the Web, an encyclopaedia, or the library.

There was a time, though, when the question of where the world came from was very difficult to answer. When religious explanations were becoming less and less credible, but scientific explanations had not become completely established, parents had to say – if they wanted to speak with integrity – “I don’t know where the world came from.”

By openly expressing their lack of certainty, parents not only acted with honesty and integrity, but also stimulated their children to pursue a truth that was admittedly absent from their world.

Alas, we suffer similar difficulties today, but about a far more important topic. The religious basis for ethics has fallen away from us, and we lack any credible or accepted theory to replace it. For a time, patriotism and allegiance to culture had some power to convince children that their elders knew something objective about ethics, but as government and military corruption have become increasingly evident, allegiance to a country, a state or a military ethos has become an increasingly fragile basis for ethical absolutes. Even our cherished theories about the virtues of democracy have come under increasing pressure, as gargantuan governments continue to separate themselves from the wishes of their citizens and act in a virtual “state of nature.”

Religious explanations of virtue have failed not just because we no longer believe in God, but also because it is now completely self-evident that when most people refer to “truth,” they are really referring to culture.

== Culture ==
Think about a father in a Muslim country. When his child asks him: “Daddy, what is goodness?” he will generally answer: “To obey Allah, and obey His Prophet.” Why is that his answer? Is it because he has had direct experience with the Prophet, wrote the holy books himself, and has a deep understanding of morality direct from the original creator? If he had grown up alone on a desert island, would his answer be the same?

Of course not. He is merely repeating what was told to him as a child.

However, there is much more to it than that.

This Muslim father knows that his child is going to have to survive – and hopefully flourish – in a Muslim society. If he tells his child that he does not know what is right and wrong, not only will he lose his moral authority in the eyes of his child, but he will also be setting his child up for endless conflicts with everyone else in his society.

In other words, if everyone else lies to their children, what are the costs – social, romantic, economic and so on – of telling your children the truth?

My neighbour has four lovely children – the other day, his son came and showed me a drawing he’d made, a decent representation of Jesus Christ sitting on a rock and praying to the heavens. In all innocence, he asked me what I thought of the picture. Naturally, I knew that his father had told him that Jesus Christ was a real and living man-god who came back from the dead, floated up to heaven, and will free him of sin if he telepathically communicates his love to this ghost. This is no more or less horrifying than any other cult of guilt and control.

But – what could I say to this child? Could I say that this was a very good drawing of a fictional character? Could I tell him that it was an excellent representation of a fairy tale? Could I see the pain and surprise in his eyes? Could I imagine the conversation that he would later have with his father, asking why the nice man next door told him that Jesus Christ was a fictional character? Could I imagine the coldness that would then descend upon the cordial relations between our two houses? Could I imagine his father telling all of his children to stay away from the nice man next door, who wants to take God away from them? Could I stomach the chilled looks that I would receive every time I saw his family for the next few decades..?

I did take the path of least resistance, but did not lie to the child. I told him that I thought the picture was well drawn, and asked him what he thought about it.

Telling the truth is not an easy thing.

We can very easily see how parents in other cultures simply repeat cultural norms to their children as if those cultural norms were objective truth. Japanese parents teach their children obedience and filial piety; Catholic parents teach their children to drink the blood of their god; Muslim parents teach their children that a man who married a six-year-old girl – and consummated that marriage when she was nine – is the paragon of moral virtue; Western parents teach their children that democracy is the highest ideal; North Korean parents teach their children that the dictator who rules their lives is a sort of secular deity who loves them.

The list goes on and on. Virtually every parent in the world believes that she is teaching her child the truth, when she is merely inflicting what may be politely called cultural mythologies on her child.

We lie to our children, all the while telling them that lying is wrong.

We command our children to think for themselves, all the while repeating the most prejudicial absurdities as if they were objective facts.
We tell our children to be good, but we have no idea what goodness really is.

We tell our children that conformity is wrong<ref>“If everyone jumped off the Empire State building, would you jump too?”</ref> but at the same time we are complete slaves to the historical inertia of prior prejudices.

== Too Harsh? ==
I have often been accused of being too harsh on parents. “Parents do the best they can under difficult circumstances; you cannot judge the practical instructions of parents according to some abstract and absolute philosophical standard. My parents were not philosophers – they were simply telling me the truth that they believed, that they thought was accurate.”

The wonderful thing about applying philosophical concepts to our own lives is that theories are very easy to test. Discussing a philosophical theory about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire is a largely theoretical exercise, since we cannot go back in time and test it.
Theories about our families, however, are very easy to test, assuming that we have access to the relevant family members.

It is my firm belief that most human beings are absolutely brilliant. I have come to this conclusion after decades of studying philosophy and having the most amazing conversations with countless people. I am now certain that parents know exactly what they are doing – and a relatively simple test can prove this to the satisfaction of any rational person.

=== A Practical Exercise ===
Sit down with your parents and ask them what the capital of Madagascar is – or some other piece of trivia that they are unlikely to know. They will very likely smile, shake their heads and say, “I don’t know.” They will not avoid the question. They will be more than happy to help you look it up. It will be a trivial fact-finding interaction.

After you have established what the capital of Madagascar is, ask them: “What is goodness?”

I absolutely guarantee you that there will be an instant chill in the room – there will be an enormous amount of tension, and your parents – and probably you – will feel a very strong desire to change the subject, or drop the question.

Why is that? Why is it that when you ask your parents to explain what goodness is, the tension in the room spikes dramatically?

Well, for the same reason that Socrates was introduced to a grim libation called hemlock.

There is terror in the face of the question “What is goodness?” because authority figures claim the right to tell us what to do based on their superior knowledge. If we decide to learn karate, we submit ourselves to the judgement and instruction of somebody who is an expert in karate. If we become ill, we submit our judgement to a doctor, an expert in the field. In other words, when we lack knowledge, we defer to those who claim greater knowledge.

Our parents claimed the right to instruct us on good and bad based on their great knowledge of ethics, not based on their power as parents. Our fathers did not say to us: “Obey me or I will beat you.” Although that terrible sentence might have come out of their mouths at some point, the basis of their ethics was that we owed them obedience as a just debt, and thus could be punished for failing to provide it. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is a staple of moral instruction the world over, both religious and secular. However, the honour that we are supposed to bestow upon our parents must be based upon their superior knowledge and practice of virtue – otherwise the word “honour” would make no sense. If we were thrown in jail, we would obey the prison guards because they held power over us, not because we “honoured” them. If a mugger presses a knife to our ribs, we hand him our wallet – obey his wishes – not because we honour him, but because he has the power to harm us.

By using the word “honour,” parents are claiming that we owe them allegiance due to their superior knowledge and practice of virtue.

Currently, the foundational “ethic” of the family – the entire basis for the authority of adults – is that parents know right from wrong, and children do not. Metaphorically, the parents are the doctors, and the children are the patients. Parents claim the authority to tell their children what to do for the same reason that doctors claim the authority to tell their patients what to do – the superior knowledge of the former, and the relative ignorance of the latter.

If you are unwell, and put yourself in the care of a doctor, and follow his instructions, but find that you do not get better – but in fact seem to get worse – it would be wise to sit down with that doctor and review his abilities – particularly if you cannot change physicians for some reason. Since following his instructions is making you worse, you must ask: “Why should I follow your instructions?”

It would be logical to begin by asking the doctor to confirm his actual credentials. Then, you might continue by asking what his definition of health is, to make sure that you were both on the same page. Then, you would continue to drill down to more specific questions about the nature of your illness, the nature of his knowledge of the human body, and his understanding of your ailments and the methodology by which he came up with your cure.

This is the conversation that you must have with your parents regarding the nature of virtue and their knowledge of it. Your parents were the moral doctors of your being while you were growing up – if, as an adult, you are happy and healthy, full of joy and engaged in deep and meaningful relationships, it is still worthwhile to examine the knowledge of your parents, since you may have children in time, and will yourself become a “doctor” to them.

If, however, you are not happy and fulfilled as an adult, then it is essential that you examine your parents’ ethical knowledge. If your health regimen has been established by a quack who has no idea what he is doing, you will never be healthy as long as you follow his instructions, since one can never randomly arrive at the truth.

If a madman passes himself off as a doctor, when a patient asks for his credentials, he will smile, spread his hands, and say, “Well of course I don’t have any!” His openness about his lack of knowledge and credentials establishes his relative innocence.

However, when the patient asks for a doctor’s credentials, if the doctor evades the question, or becomes hostile, or dismissive, then clearly the “doctor” is fully aware of what he is doing at some level. A man who commits a murder in a police station may claim insanity; a man who murders in secret and then hides the body has the capacity for rationality, if not virtue, and thus cannot claim to be mad.

The fact that your parents will do almost anything to avoid the question “What is goodness?” is the most revealing piece of knowledge that you can possess. It is the fact that blows the cage of culture wide open. It is the horrifying knowledge that will set you free.

You will not just benefit from examining your parents. You can also sit down with your priest, and examine him with regards to the nature of the existence of God.<ref>This is a useful conversation to have with religious parents as well.</ref> If you are persistent, and do your research in advance, you will very quickly discover that your priest also has no certain knowledge about the existence of God – and will become very uncomfortable and/or aggressive if you persist, which you should.

Is it wrong for a priest to say that he only believes in God because he “has a feeling”? In terms of truth, not exactly – in terms of integrity, absolutely.

The fundamental problem is not that the priest claims the emotional irrationality of “faith” as his justification for his belief in God, but rather that the existence of God was presented to you as an objective fact, and also that you were not allowed the same criteria for “knowledge.”

These two facets of the falsehoods you were told as a child are essential to your liberation as an adult.

== Fiction as Facts ==
When you were a child, you did not have the ability to objectively validate the commandments of those who had power over you. Your susceptibility was a great temptation to those who would rather be believed than be right. All power tends to corrupt, and the power that parents have over their children is the greatest power in the world.

A child is biologically predisposed to trust and obey his parents – this has great utility, insofar as parents will often tell their children not to eat poisonous berries, pull hot frying pans off the stove, or run around all day outside without sunscreen on. The requirements of survival tend to discourage endless “trial and error.”

When parents instruct their children, they can either present that instruction as conditional, or absolute. Conditional instructions – do not hit your brother except in self-defence – tend to lead to endless additional questions, and quickly reveal the parents’ lack of knowledge. As the child continues to ask what exactly defines self-defence, whether pre-emptive strikes are allowable, whether teasing can be considered aggression and so on, the fuzzy areas innate to all systems of ethics quickly come into view.

As these fuzzy areas become clearer, parents fear once more the loss of moral authority. However, the fact that certain areas of ethics are harder to define than others does not mean that ethics as a whole is a purely subjective discipline. In biology, the classification of very similar species tends to be fuzzy as well – at least before the discovery of DNA – but that does not mean that biology is a purely subjective science. Water can never be perfectly pure, but that does not mean that bottled water is indistinguishable from seawater.

Due to their desire for simple and absolute moral commandments, parents spend enormous amounts of energy continually herding their children away from the “cliff edges” of ethical complexities. They deploy a wide variety of distractive and abusive tactics to achieve this end – and all these tactics are designed to convince the child that his parents possess absolute knowledge of ethical matters.

However, as children grow – particularly into the teenage years – a certain danger begins to arise. The children, formerly compliant,<ref>At least from the “terrible twos” through the latency period.</ref> begin to suspect that their parents’ “knowledge” is little more than a form of hypocritical bullying. They begin to see the true conformity of their parents with regards to culture, and really begin to understand that what was presented to them as objective fact was in reality subjective opinion.

This causes great confusion and resentment, because teenagers instinctually grasp the true corruption of their parents.

A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.

Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A “doctor” who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.

Recognising the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognises the value of facts. Using the credibility of “truth” to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.

Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.

Children have no such defences.

=== Do As I Say, Not As I Do… ===
The second major hypocrisy involved in presenting subjective opinion as absolute fact is that parents reserve this power only for themselves – and self-righteously punish children for doing exactly the same thing.

Take the question of going to church. Religious parents tell their children that they must go to church. When the children ask why, they are told, “Because God exists, and He loves you,” or other such nonsense. In other words, parents command their children with reference to objective absolutes. Children are absolutely not allowed to say, “I don’t want to go to church because I don’t feel like it.”

Fast-forward a decade or so. The child – now a teenager – sits down with his parents and asks: “Why do you believe in God?”

If he is persistent and knowledgeable, he will quickly corner his parents into admitting that they believe in God because of “faith.” In other words, they have no proof that God exists, but believe in God because they feel like it – since no matter how emotionally compelling faith is, it remains in essence a feeling that contradicts reason and evidence.

However, when that teenager was a child, he was never allowed to make decisions because he just felt like it. He was not allowed to stay home from church because he didn’t feel like going. He was always sent to school despite his preference for staying home at times. His feelings did not create truth, or establish objectively valid criteria for action.

When he used exactly the same methodology that his parents used, he was called disobedient, wrong, sinful, wilful, immoral, stubborn and a thousand other pejoratives. For his parents, acting on the primacy of feeling is praised as an absolute and objective virtue. For him, acting on the primacy of feeling is condemned as an absolute and objective vice.

==== Conformity ====
As the child grows up, his tendency to want to “merge with the herd” is criticised as an immoral weakness. Any susceptibility to fashion trends, linguistic ticks, prized possessions, general sexual habits or any other form of “group-think” is opposed by his parents on supposedly objective and moral grounds.

Again – generally in the teenage years – the child begins to realise that his parents do not actually oppose group-think or conformity on principle, but only attack competing conformities. If a son begins to run with a wild gang, his parents will criticise him on the grounds of conformity, but it is not conformity that they object to, but conformity with a gang they disapprove of, rather than with a group they approve of.

And it gets even worse than that.

The reason that the parents dislike the child’s new gang is because the parents fear disapproval from their own gang. If the son of religious parents starts hanging out with a group of atheists, his parents will criticise him for his mindless conformity, and pointless rebellion – but only because they fear being attacked, criticised or undermined by their own religious peers. In other words, they effectively tell their son: “You should not be susceptible to the disapproval of your peers, because we are susceptible to the disapproval of our peers.”

== Is Ignorance Hypocrisy? ==
The argument is often made that parents are not aware of all the complexities of their own hypocrisies, and thus are not morally responsible for their inconsistencies.

Fortunately, there is no need for us to rely on mere theory to establish the truth of this proposition.

If I tell you to take the highway to get to your destination, and it turns out that this takes you in the exact opposite direction, what would be a rational response if I were truly ignorant of the fact that I was giving you really bad directions?

Well, I would first insist that they were the correct directions, since I genuinely believe that they are. However, when you sat me down with a map and pointed out exactly why my directions were so bad, I would see the truth, apologise profusely, and openly promise never to give out bad directions again – and buy a whole bunch of maps to boot, and spend some significant amount of time studying them.

However, if I got angry the moment that you brought up that I had sent you in the wrong direction, and refused to look at any maps, and refused to admit that I was wrong, and kept changing the subject, and kept distracting you with emotional tricks, and got more and more upset, and refused to tell you how I came up with my directions – and ended up storming out of the room, you may be unsure of many things, but you would not be unsure of one thing at least.

You would no longer imagine that I was ever interested in giving good directions.

In the realm of the parent-child relationship, this realisation comes as a profound and terrible shock. This realisation lands like a nuclear blast over a shanty town, radiating out in waves of destruction, smashing down the assumptions you have about all of your existing relationships.

The moment you realise that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians – your elders in general – only used morality to control you, to subjugate you – as a tool of abuse – your life will never be the same again.

The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture – it reveals the awful “cult” in culture.

A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough – how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?

A fraud is still better than a sadist.

What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children – who respect the power of virtue – and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?

In films, terrorists almost invariably kidnap the wife or child of the hero in order to enforce his compliance with their wishes. His virtues – love and loyalty – are thus turned into the service of evil. The better he is, the worse he must act. The more he loves virtue, the more he is controlled by evil.

And thus do the best become the worst.

And thus are children raised.

And this was your instruction.

== Reluctance ==
We instinctively shy away from confronting the moral void at the core of our relationships – and, fundamentally, the moral void at the core of our relationship with ourselves.

There is a simple and terrible reason for our reluctance to confront this emptiness.

Societies are generally built upon mythologies – in fact, a society can be accurately defined as a group of people who all share the same mythology.

I use the term “mythology” here because I want to ease you into the idea of social fictions, and the degree to which they distort your relationship to yourself and others – and thus your relationship to reality.

There are two major disciplines, which help us dispel the corrosive cobwebs of social fictions and reach through them to grasp reality. The first is theoretical; the second is practical.

The first discipline is logic, which is the process of organising our thoughts in a systematic and non-contradictory manner. The second is science, which is the testing of logical theories against empirical observations. The union of these two disciplines is philosophy, which is in its fundamentals the testing of theories of knowledge against both logic and empirical observation.

Logic will tell you that two plus two equals four; science will verify that placing two rocks next to two other rocks will result in an aggregation of four rocks.

But it is philosophy that tells us that logic plus empirical testability are both key requirements to the establishment of the truth. It is philosophy that specifically rejects the primacy of faith, or the primacy of emotion, or the primacy of authority, or the primacy of age, or the primacy of preference, or the primacy of biology – or any of the other foolish and exploitive mechanisms that human beings have used as substitutes for logic and evidence in order to inflict “truth” on the helpless.

Philosophy is the opposite of mythology. Or, more accurately, truth is the opposite of falsehood.

We are, all of us, deeply aware of the deficiencies of our beliefs. The basic knowledge that our beliefs are mere prejudices, inflicted on us by parents and teachers, is a fact that, deep down, we are all perfectly aware of. The amount of energy that we all put into pretending otherwise is staggering, and debilitating. There is a reason that depression is one of the most prevalent forms of illness.

The contradiction at the core of social mythology is that these cultural falsehoods are always presented as objective and absolute truths.
Americans, for instance, are famously proud of their country, and the beliefs that they have inherited from the Enlightenment philosophers and the Founding Fathers. This is a very strange notion when you examine it.

The average American just happened to be born in America – it is a mere accident, not something earned. The average American takes pride in his cultural heritage, which he did not invent, and which was taught to him by others, who also did not invent it. Believing that you are virtuous because you were born in a particular country is like believing that you are an excellent businessman because you inherited a lot of money, or that you are a good person because you happen to be tall.

The average American has no idea of the philosophical premises underpinning the ideal of a constitutionally limited government. The average American enthusiastically supports a government that is hundreds of times more oppressive and brutal than the British government from which his ancestors fought to free themselves. The average American enthusiastically celebrates Independence Day, despite the fact that, when his country was founded, slavery was protected, and basic rights for women and children were denied.

In other words, the average American blindly praises his own culture and history because he is taught to praise it, not because he has any rational understanding of its actual merits and deficiencies.

This is not to say that America is not a better country than, for instance, Syria. It is, and I am glad not to be living in Syria. However, the methodology for transmitting value from parent to child remains the same in both countries. The genuine values in America arose from rational thought and breaking with tradition, not from blind allegiance to dirt and cloth.

The average American considers himself superior to the average Muslim, because he believes to some degree in the separation of church and state, supports limited democracy and the rights of women, and respects certain aspects of the free market. He believes that these are good values to hold, and criticises Muslims for not holding the same values.

The sad fact is that while specific beliefs vary from culture to culture, the methodology of belief in all cultures is identical. The simple fact is that if the average American had been born to Muslim parents in Syria, he would be exactly the same as the average Syrian Muslim. He would be no more likely to value the separation of church and state than the average Western woman born in Manhattan would be likely to wear a burka.

Patriotism is the hijacking of the achievements of others – usually ancestors – and taking ego gratification in them as if they were one’s own. This involves a curious distortion of logic that is blindingly obvious when seen.

Either someone is a good person because he was born in America, or because he conforms to objective standards of goodness. You either like a car because it is a Buick, or Buicks are good cars because they get excellent economy.

If someone is good because he was born in America, then clearly he cannot judge a man born in Saudi Arabia as deficient in any way, either morally or culturally. The essence of aristocracy – the eternal plague of mankind – is the belief that we are “born into” superiority; that our “excellence” is somehow innate. However, if an American is “superior” to a Saudi, then that superiority is not earned. If Bob were born in Saudi Arabia rather than America, he would be an “inferior” Muslim rather than a “superior” Christian or American. Thus Bob’s superiority – or lack thereof – has nothing to do with his personal choices, but is rather defined by the accidents of geography and birth. Either Bob claims to be better due to geography, which is impossible – or due to his own personal virtue, in which case geography has nothing to do with it.

Both Americans and Muslims are simply reproducing what they are told – what is inflicted on them through emotional punishments when they are children – and calling it “morality.” This is exactly the same as a child who is force-fed, who then calls being overweight “moral,” while the child next door is underfed, and then calls being skinny “moral.” Sports fans are the same way – the closest franchise is just somehow the “best.”

Basically, culture is the compulsion to call whatever surrounds you “moral.” If you live in the mountains, it is moral to live in the mountains. If you were taught to swim, then swimming is moral. If you were not taught to swim, then swimming is immoral. If you were taught to cover your legs, then baring your legs is “immodest.” If you were taught to uncover your legs, then covering them up is “prudish.” If you were taught to fold the flag a certain way, then folding the flag any other way is “disrespectful.”

When I was six, I was sent to an English boarding school. One of the rules there was that I was had to wear garters around my socks to keep them up, especially in church. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I entered the church without my garters on, I was being “disrespectful to God.” This didn’t make much sense to me; I argued that God made my legs, and men made garters, and I was sure that God would appreciate looking at his own creation rather than something that men made.

Naturally, my objections were also framed as immoral talk-back – I was being “disrespectful” to the headmaster.

I am sure you get the idea.

Everything that surrounds you is framed in terms of ethics, because framing things in terms of ethics works. If you can get a child to believe that something is right or wrong, you control that child’s mind, his body, his allegiance, his very being. Moral arguments have a power that is unmatched in any other form of human interaction. In terms of social control, moral arguments are the ultimate WMDs.

== Susceptibility ==
As children, we are highly susceptible to moral arguments because we so desperately want to be good, and because we know that “morality” is synonymous with praise, while “immorality” is synonymous with punishment. When our parents, priests and teachers tell us that something is “good,” what they are really saying is: “You will not be punished for this – and you may even be rewarded!” Conversely, when we are told that something is “bad,” what we are really being told is that we will be punished for doing – or even contemplating – whatever it is.

We are not punished for being bad. “Being bad” is invented so that we may be “justly” punished.

Those in authority are continually driven to hide their perpetual use of power over their victims. Our teachers do not like to openly tell us that they will hurt us if we disobey them, because that is too naked a display of abusive power.

It is also a highly inefficient form of control.

If your teacher were to say, “If you lie to me, I will punish you” – and just left it at that, then lying would always be more or less a calculated risk – and being punished for lying would have no more moral significance than being fouled while playing basketball. If a teacher is facing a class of thirty students, each of whom is calculating whether or not he can get away with a lie, then clearly, as more of them lie, each lie becomes that much harder to catch, just as it is harder to figure out exactly who is talking when twenty children are chatting rather than just two.

Furthermore, if a parent openly uses brute force to compel compliance from a child, then the pattern-making centres in our brains will immediately extract a principle out of that interaction. Within our minds, every decision and interaction is involuntarily extrapolated into a principle. If our parents compel our compliance with brute force, then the principle that we extract from that interaction is: “Whoever has the power should use it abusively to control everyone else.” Or: “Whoever has the most power should inflict his will on whoever has the least power.”

Due to the natural decay of organic life, this is a rather dangerous principle for parents to establish. If we think of a single mother raising two boys, we can easily see that creating a principle called “brute force rules” – while perhaps having a certain practical utility when they are young – will scarcely serve her well when her boys hit their teenage years, and become physically far stronger than she is. Even fathers will reach dotage and physical weakness relative to their sons, and thus will scarcely benefit from applying the principle of “whoever has the most power should forcefully subjugate whoever has the least power.”

Thus the use of force must be forever shrouded in the fog of “ethics.” This is a very tricky business logically, because what is required is a simultaneous appeal to both a principle, and a person – which is directly contradictory.

=== The Contradictory Appeal ===
When your father says, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” he is invoking both a principle and a person. The principle is that all mothers and fathers are honourable, and so deserving of respect. The person that he is invoking is himself and your mother specifically – thy mother and father.

Logically, this makes no sense.

Saying, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is like saying, “Honour all the women who are my wife.” If I must honour all women, then I will automatically honour your wife, since she is a woman. If I must honour your wife, then there is no point saying that I must honour her as a woman, because that would involve honouring all women again. It’s one or the other.

If you must honour the category “father” and “mother,” then you must respect all mothers and fathers equally. Showing preference for your own parents would be unjust.

If you must show preference for your own mother and father, then the category of “mother” and “father” is irrelevant. It must be for some other reason, then, that you should honour these particular individuals.

If you should bestow honour upon your mother and father as individuals, and for no objective principle, then what is really being demanded is not honour, but obedience towards individuals in the guise of honour as a principle.

This basic logical contradiction, while complicated to discuss syllogistically, is something that every child instinctually understands. When our mother demands that we respect her, do we not feel contempt, frustration and despair? Demanding respect is like demanding love, or hijacking an aircraft. It is commanding a destination, rather than respecting the free choices of individuals.

We cannot imagine someone hijacking an aircraft on its way to Vladivostok and demanding, “Take me to Vladivostok!” People hijack planes because the plane is not going where they want to go.

=== Efficient Control ===
If, however, through intimidation, the distinction between the principle and the person can be blurred and buried, a far more efficient mechanism of control is achieved. If a child – or a citizen – can be taught to obey a person as if that person were a universal principle, the foundations of hegemonic dictatorship, whether in the family, the church, the school or the state, are firmly established. If a child’s mind can be taught to obey the whims of an individual to the same degree that the child’s body obeys the absolutes of gravity, then near-perfect control can be established.

Of course, this control incurs a terrible cost – and a terrible risk. The cost accrues to both the parent and the child, as is the case in all corrupt interactions. By using false and inconsistent principles to teach the child to obey a person rather than a principle, the child’s ability to extract principles from interactions is crippled. Such children inevitably grow up to repeat destructive patterns in relationships, seemingly without any ability to learn from their mistakes. How could they learn from their mistakes? They have been taught as a principle to obey individuals – how can they then conceivably extract generalised principles from the behaviour of those individuals? That would be like hoping that water will flow uphill. Expecting such people to extract productive principles from their interactions with others is like expecting a medieval monk who believes that the world follows the whims of the gods to discover the theory of relativity – or even the scientific method itself.

For the parents, the cost is a perpetual and growing fear of the intelligence and perceptiveness of their children, which manifests in a variety of ways, such as genial blankness, corrosive contempt, yawning indifference or fussy irritability.

For our parents – and our elders in general – the modern world has virtually guaranteed that the gig is up.

The antidote to false morality is a multiplicity of false moralities. The antidote to irrational prejudice is more irrational prejudices.
It is by being able to see the world as a whole that we can finally set ourselves free.

== Detonating Mythology ==
If we were only ever exposed to English, we would not think of it as “English,” just as “language.” The need to differentiate English as a language only arises when we come into contact with other languages.

Similarly, if we are only exposed to our own mythologies, we do not think of them as mythologies, but rather as the truth. If we only know our own god, then we can refer to this fiction as “God” – this is a universe away from saying “a god,” – or, more accurately “our god.”

Deep down, each of us knows that our faith in our fragile fairy tales can only be sustained if we constantly steer clear of competing fairy tales. This tends to cripple our capacity for empathy – we must in our hearts ridicule the foolish beliefs of other cultures, and never take the terrifying leap of trying to see our own culture through their eyes.

The fear and hatred that so often mars the relations between different cultural groups does not arise out of ignorance, but rather out of knowledge. Christians feel uneasy around Muslims – and Muslims feel uneasy around Christians – not because they are different, but because they are the same. Two adulterous women who know each others’ secrets will, if forced to sit together for lunch, have a very uncomfortable time – not because they know too little about each other, but rather because they know too much.

The only way that mythology can sustainably dominate generation after generation is by pretending that it is not mythology, but reality.

To help clarify this, consider the following thought experiment.

Imagine that the water in a sink has consciousness, and is sentient. Now imagine that I pour this water into a variety of glass containers, each of a different shape. The water, since it is sentient, would doubtless congratulate itself on its individuality. Since it would be unable to see the glass that surrounded it, contained it, and shaped its very form, it would honestly believe that its true physical shape was a mug, jar, test tube, or martini glass.

The sentient water filling the test tube would look at all the funny glass shapes around it and be enormously amused. “Do they not know how ridiculous they seem from the outside? Can they really imagine that that is their true shape? It’s madness!” it would chortle, pressed up against the glass of its own conceptual prison. And the water in the martini glass would look at all the other containers – including the test tube – and say exactly the same thing.

And this, really, is the state of all of the different cultures around the world. Each of us is poured into a clear glass container, which we believe represents the truth, which provides us with a shape and an identity that we mistake for “human nature.” And this can work relatively well – at least until we begin to catch sight of all the other glass containers surrounding us.

For a time, we will endeavour to maintain the illusion that only other water is contained in an obvious glass container – not us! However, there are those among us who can break free from the glass cage of culture – we stand outside such containers, and from our vantage point, the differences in the sizes and shapes of the containers are practically irrelevant.

The size and shape of your prison is not important. The fact that you are in a prison is.

The knowledge that you are in a prison does not have to be learned. It only has to be accepted. It is not something that you do not know. At a very deep level, you are perfectly aware that what you call the truth is just the magical physics of invisible fairy tales.

How do I know this?

As with every idea in this book, there is no need to take my word for anything. You can easily discover your deep understanding of this fact with a few simple experiments.

As I have mentioned before, you can sit down with your parents and ask them about goodness. You can sit down with your friends and tell them that you are afraid that you are living in a fiction that is sapping your joy and independence. You can go to a mosque and ask if you can observe. You can put yourself in someone else’s “glass container” and see how you feel.

Try it. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine sitting down with your parents to ask them about goodness, or having a drink with your friends and talking about social mythologies. Do you feel nervous? Do you feel a vague and uneasy fluttering in your stomach at the very thought of such honesty and curiosity?

Why? Why do you feel afraid? Why have you never asked such questions? Who told you that such questions were not allowed? Were you ever punished for asking these questions in the past? Is there any law against asking such questions?

What will happen when you ask such questions?

You already know the answer. That is why you are afraid.

It is not cowardice that makes you afraid. It is wisdom that makes you afraid.

Because you have every reason to be afraid.

== Mythological Love ==
Our whole lives, we are surrounded by people who claim to love us. Our parents perpetually claim to be motivated by what is best for us. Our teachers eternally proclaim that their sole motivation is to help us learn. Our priests voice concern for our eternal souls, and extended family members endlessly announce their devotion to the clan.

When people claim to love us, it is not unreasonable to expect that they know us. If you tell me that you love Thailand, but it turns out that you have never been there, and know very little about it, then it is hard for me to believe that you really love it. If I say that I love opera, but I never listen to opera – well, you get the general idea!

If I say that I love you, but I know little about your real thoughts and feelings, and have no idea what your true values are – or perhaps even what your favourite books, authors or films are – then it should logically be very hard for you to believe me.

This is certainly the case in my family. My mother, brother and father made extravagant claims about their love for me. However, when I finally sat down and asked each of them to recount a few facts about me – some of my preferences and values – I got a perfect tripod of “thousand yard stares.”

So, I thought, if people who know almost nothing about me claim to love me, then either they are lying, or I do not understand love at all.
I will not go into details about my theories of love here, other than to say that, in my view, love is our involuntary response to virtue, just as well-being is our involuntary response to a healthy lifestyle.<ref>Our affection for our babies is more attachment than mature love, since it is shared throughout the animal kingdom.</ref>

Virtue is a complicated subject, but I am sure we can agree that virtue must involve some basics that are commonly understood, such as courage, integrity, benevolence, empathy, wisdom and so on.

If this is the case, it cannot be possible to love people that we know very little about. If love requires virtue, then we cannot love perfect strangers, because we know nothing about their virtues. Love depends both on another person’s virtue, and our knowledge of it – and it grows in proportion to that virtue and knowledge, if we are virtuous ourselves.

Throughout my childhood, whenever I expressed a personal thought, desire, wish, preference or feeling, I was generally met with eye rolling, incomprehension, avoidance or, all too often, outright scorn. These various “rejection tactics” were completely co-joined with expressions of love and devotion. When I started getting into philosophy – through the works of Ayn Rand originally – my growing love of wisdom was dismissed out of hand as some sort of psychological dysfunction.

Since my family knew precious little about my virtues – and what they did know they disliked – then we could not all be virtuous. If they were virtuous, and disliked my values, then my values could not be virtuous. If I was virtuous, and they disliked my values, then they could not be virtuous.

And so I set about trying to create an “ethical map” of my family.

It was the most frightening thing I have ever done. The amount of emotional resistance that I felt towards the idea of trying to rationally and morally understand my family was staggering – it literally felt as if I were sprinting directly off a cliff.

Why was it so terrifying?

Well, because I knew that they were lying. I knew that they were lying about loving me, and I knew that, by claiming to be confused about whether they loved me, I was lying as well – and to myself, which is the worst of all falsehoods.

== Love: The Word versus the Deed ==
Saying the word “success” is far easier than actually achieving success. Mouthing the word “love” is far easier than actually loving someone for the right reasons – and being loved for the right reasons.

If we do not have any standards for being loved, then laziness and indifference will inevitably result. If I have a job where I work from home, and no one ever checks up on me, and I never have to produce anything, and I get paid no matter what, and I cannot get fired, how long will it be before my work ethic decays? Days? Weeks? Certainly not months.

One of the most important questions to ask in any examination of the truth is “compared to what?” For instance, if I say I love you, implicit in that statement is a preference for you over others. In other words, compared to others, I prefer you. We prefer honesty compared to falsehood, satiation to hunger, warmth to cold and so on.

It is not logically valid to equate the word “love” with “family.” The word “family” is a mere description of a biological commonality – it makes no more sense to equate “love” with “family” than it does to equate “love” with “mammal.” Thus the word “love” must mean a preference compared to – what?

It is impossible to have any standards for love if we do not have any standards for truth. Since being honest is better than lying, and courage is better than cowardice, and truth is better than falsehood, we cannot have honesty and courage unless we are standing for something that is true. Thus when we say that we “love” someone, what we really mean is that his actions are consistent, compared to a rational standard of virtue. In the same way, when I say that somebody is “healthy,” what I really mean is that his organs are functioning consistently, relative to a rational standard of well-being.

Thus love is not a subjective preference, or a biological commonality, but our involuntary response to virtuous actions on the part of another.

If we truly understand this definition, then it is easy for us to see that a society that does not know truth cannot ever know love.

If nothing is true, virtue is impossible.

If virtue is impossible, then we are forced to pretend to be virtuous, through patriotism, clan loyalties, cultural pride, superstitious conformities and other such amoral counterfeits.

If virtue is impossible, then love is impossible, because actions cannot be compared to any objective standard of goodness. If love is impossible, we are forced to resort to sentimentality, or the shallow show and outward appearance of love.

Thus it can be seen that any set of principles that interferes with our ability to know and understand the truth hollows us out, undermining and destroying our capacity for love. False principles, illusions, fantasies and mythologies separate us from each other, from virtue, from love, from the true connections that we can achieve only through reality.

In fantasy, there is only isolation and pretence. Mythology is, fundamentally, loneliness and emptiness.

== Imagination versus Fantasy ==
At this point, I think it would be well worth highlighting the differences between imagination and fantasy, because many people, on hearing my criticisms of mythology, think that they are now not supposed to enjoy Star Wars.

Imagination is a creative faculty that is deeply rooted in reality. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a mere species of intangible wish fulfilment It took Tolkien decades of study and writing to produce “The Lord of the Rings” – and each part of that novel was rationally consistent with the whole. That is an example of imagination. If I laze about daydreaming that one day I will make a fortune by writing a better novel than “The Lord of the Rings” – but never actually set pen to paper – that is an example of fantasy. Imagination produced the theory of relativity, not fantasising about someday winning a Nobel Prize.

Daydreams that are never converted into action are the ultimate procrastination. Imagining a wonderful future that you never have to act to achieve prevents you from achieving a wonderful future.

In the same way, imagining that you know the truth when you do not prevents you from ever learning the truth. Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of knowledge. If you are going the wrong way, but do not doubt your direction, you will never turn around.

As Socrates noted more than two thousand years ago, doubt is the midwife of curiosity, and curiosity breeds wisdom.

Fantasy is the opposite of doubt. Mythology provides instant answers when people do not even know what the questions are. In the Middle Ages, when someone asked “Where did the world come from?” he was told: “God made it.” This effectively precluded the necessity of asking the more relevant question: “What is the world?”

Because religious people believed they knew where the world came from, there was little point asking what the world was. Because there was little point asking what the world was, they never learned where the world came from.

Fantasy is a circle of nothingness, forever eating its own tail.

== Defining Love ==
If people fantasise that they know what is true, then they inevitably stop searching for the truth. If I am driving home, I stop driving when I get there. If people fantasise that they know what goodness is, they inevitably stop trying to understand goodness.

And, most importantly, if people fantasise that they already are good, they stop trying to become good. If you want a baby, and you believe that you are pregnant, you stop trying to get pregnant.

The question – which we already know the answer to – thus remains: why do people who claim to love us never tell us what love is?

If I am an accomplished mathematician, and my child comes to me and asks me about the times tables, it would be rude and churlish of me to dismiss his questions. If I go to my mother, who for thirty years has claimed to love me, and ask her what love is, why is it that she refuses to answer my question? Why does my brother roll his eyes and change the subject whenever I ask him what it is that he loves about me? Why does my father claim to love me, while continually rejecting everything that I hold precious?

Why does everyone around me perpetually use words that they refuse to define? Are they full of a knowledge that they cannot express? That is not a good reason for refusing to discuss the topics. A novelist who writes instinctually would not logically be hostile if asked about the source of his inspiration. He may not come up with a perfect answer, but there would be no reason to perpetually avoid the subject.

Unless…

Unless, of course, he is a plagiarist.

== What We Know ==
This is the knowledge that we have, but hate and fear.

We know that the people who claim to love us know precious little about us, and nothing at all about love.

We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to create obligations within us.

We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to control us.

And they know it too.

It is completely obvious that they know this, because they know exactly which topics to avoid. A counterfeiter will not mind if you ask him what the capital of Madagascar is. A counterfeiter will mind, however, if you ask him whether you can check the authenticity of his money. Why is this the one topic that he will try to avoid at all costs?

Because he knows that his currency is fake.

And he also knows that if you find that out, he can no longer use it to rob you blind.

== Obligations ==
If I own a store, and take counterfeit money from a con man, but do not know that it is counterfeit, then I am obligated to hand over what he has “bought.”

In the same way, if I believe that I am loved – even when I am not loved – I am to a degree honour-bound to return that love. If my mother says that she loves me, and she is virtuous, then she must love me because I am virtuous. Since she is herself virtuous, then I “owe” her love as a matter of justice, just as I owe trust to someone who consistently behaves in a trustworthy manner.

Thus when somebody tries to convince you that they love you, they’re actually attempting to create an obligation in you. If I try to convince you that I am a trustworthy person, it is because I want all the benefits of being treated as if I were a trustworthy person. If I am in fact a trustworthy person, then I must understand the nature of trust – at least at some level – and thus I must know that it cannot be demanded, but must be earned. Since earning trust is harder than just demanding trust, I must know the real value of trust, otherwise I would not have taken the trouble to earn it through consistent behaviour – I would have just demanded it and skipped all the hard stuff!

If you demand trust, you are demanding the unearned, which indicates that you do not believe you can earn it. Thus anyone who demands trust is automatically untrustworthy.

Why do people demand trust?

To rob others.

If I want to borrow money from you, and I demand that you trust me, it’s because I am not trustworthy, and will be unlikely to pay you back.
In other words, I want to steal your money, and put you in my power.

It’s the same with love.

== Love and Virtue ==
If I am virtuous, then virtuous people will regard me with at least respect, if not love. Corrupt or evil people may regard me with a certain respect, but they will certainly not love me.

Thus being virtuous and refusing to demand love from anyone is the best way to find other virtuous people. If you are virtuous and undemanding, then other virtuous people will naturally gravitate towards you. Virtue that does not impose itself on others is like a magnet for goodness, and repels corruption.

The practical result of true virtue is fundamental self-protection.

If my stockbroker consistently gets me thirty percent return on my investments, is there any amount of money that I will not give him, other than what I need to live? Of course not! Because I know I will always get back more than I give.

It’s the same with real love.

If I am virtuous, then I will inevitably feel positively inclined towards other virtuous people – and the more virtuous they are, the more I will love them. My energy, time and resources will be at their disposal, because I know that I will not be exploited, and that they will reciprocate my generosity.

If you and I have lent money to each other over the years, and have always paid each other back, then the next time you come to me for a loan, it would be unjust for me to tell you that I will not lend you anything because I do not think you will pay me back. Your continued and perpetual honesty towards me in financial matters has created an obligation in me towards you. This does not mean that I must lend you money whenever you ask for it, but I cannot justly claim as my reason for not lending you money a belief that you will not pay me back.

In the same way, if you have been my wife for twenty years, and I have never been unfaithful, if a woman calls and then hangs up, it would be unjust for you to immediately accuse me of infidelity.

A central tactic for creating artificial and unjust obligations in others is to demand their positive opinion, without being willing to earn it. The most effective way to do this is to offer a positive opinion, which has not been earned – to claim to love others.

If, over the past twenty years, I have rarely paid back any money I have borrowed from you, it is perfectly reasonable to refuse me an additional loan. I may then get angry, and call you unfair, and demand that you treat me as if I were trustworthy, but it would scarcely be virtuous for you to comply with my wishes. Indeed, it would be dishonest and unjust for you to ignore my untrustworthiness, because you would be acting as if there was no difference between someone who pays back loans, and someone who does not.

When we act in a virtuous manner towards others, we are creating a reservoir of goodwill that we can draw upon, just as when we put our savings into a bank. A man can act imperfectly and still be loved, just as a man can eat an occasional candy bar and still be healthy, but there is a general requirement for consistency in any discipline. I could probably hit a home run in a major-league ballpark once every thousand pitches, but that would scarcely make me a professional baseball player!

If I act in a trustworthy manner, I do not have to ask you to trust me – and in fact, I would be very unwise to do so. Either you will trust me voluntarily, which means that you respect honourable and consistent behaviour, and justly respond to those who do good, or you will not trust me voluntarily, which means that you do not respond in a just manner to trustworthy behaviour, and thus cannot be trusted yourself.

If, on the other hand, I come up to you and demand that you trust me, I am engaged in a complex calculation of counterfeiting and plunder.
The first thing I am trying to do is establish whether or not you know anything about trust. The second thing is to figure out your level of confidence and self-esteem. The third thing is figure out if you know anything about integrity.

An attacker will always try to find the weakest chink in your armour. If I demand trust from you, and you agree to provide it – without any prior evidence – then I know that you do not know anything about trust. Similarly, if you do not require that your trust be earned, then I know that you lack confidence and self-esteem. If you are willing to treat me as if I were trustworthy when I am not trustworthy, then it is clear to me you know very little about integrity.

This tells me all I need to know about your history. This tells me that you were never treated with respect as a child, and that you were never taught to judge people according to independent standards, and that every time you tried to stand up for yourself, your family attacked you.
In other words, I will know that you are easy prey.

I cannot create an obligation in you unless you accept that I have treated you justly in the past. As in all things, it is far easier to convince a weak person that you have treated him justly, than it is to actually treat people in a just and consistent manner. If I can convince you that I have treated you justly in the past, then you “owe” me trust and respect in the present.

== “Love” as Predation ==
Imagine that we are brothers, and one day you awake from a coma to see me sitting by your bed. After some small talk, I tell you that you owe me one thousand dollars, which you borrowed from me the day of your accident. I tell you that because I am a kind brother, and you are in the hospital, you do not have to pay me back the thousand dollars – I would just like you to remember it, so that the next time I need to borrow one thousand dollars, you will lend it to me.

You might look in the pockets of the jeans you wore the day of your accident, and you might look around your apartment to see if there was one thousand dollars lying around, but there would be no real way to prove that I had not lent you the money. You would either have to call me a liar – an accusation for which you have no certain proof – or you would feel substantially more obligated to lend me money in the future.

If you call me a liar, I will get angry. If you accept the obligation without ever finding the one thousand dollars, you will feel resentful. Either way, our relationship is harmed – and by telling you about the one thousand dollars, I have voluntarily introduced a complication and a suspicion into our relationship, which is scarcely loving, just or benevolent.

This is the kind of brinkmanship and deception that goes on all the time in relationships – particularly in families.

When our parents tell us that they love us, they are in fact demanding that we provide for them. They are basically telling us that they have lent us one thousand dollars – even if we cannot remember it – and thus we owe them trust in the future, if not one thousand dollars in the present!

In other words, our parents spend an enormous amount of energy convincing us that they “love” us in order to create artificial obligations within us. In doing so, they take a terrible risk – and force us to make an even more terrible choice.

== Brinkmanship ==
When somebody tells you that they love you, it is either a statement of genuine regard, based on mutual virtue, or it is an exploitive and unjust demand for your money, time, resources, or approval.

There is very little in between.

Either love is real, and a true joy, or love is false, and the most corrupt and cowardly form of theft that can be imagined.

If love is real, then it inflicts no unjust obligations. If love is real, then it is freely given without demands. If a good man gives you his love, and you do not reciprocate it, then he just realises that he was mistaken, learns a little, and moves on. If a woman tells you that she loves you, and then resents any hesitation or lack of reciprocation you display, then she does not love you, but is using the word “love” as a kind of hook, to entrap you into doing what she wants, to your own detriment.

How can you possibly know whether the love that somebody expresses towards you is genuine or not?

It’s very, very simple.

When it is genuine, you feel it.

What happens, though, when a parent demands love from us?

Well, we must either submit to this demand, and pretend to respond in kind, or we must confront her on her manipulation – thus threatening the entire basis of the relationship.

Would someone who truly loves us ever put us in this terrible position?

=== Society and Religion ===
The principle of inflicting a good opinion in order to create an unjust obligation occurs at a social level, as well as at a personal level. Soldiers are supposed to have died “protecting us,” which creates an obligation for us to support the troops. The mere act of being born in a country creates a lifelong obligation to pay taxes at the point of a gun, in order to receive services that we never directly asked for. John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country,” is another way of saying, “One of us is going to get screwed in this interaction, and it ain’t gonna be me!”

The same thing occurs in the realm of religion, of course, as well. Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, you will be punished if you do not obey, Hell is the destination of unbelievers etc. etc. etc.

All of these emotional tricks are designed to create an obligation in you that would not exist in any reasonable universe.

“Sacrifice,” in other words, is merely demand in disguise.

== Unconscious? ==
All of these substantial criticisms rest on the premise that people do actually know what love really is, and merely counterfeit it for the sake of personal gain – just as any moral criticism of a counterfeiter rests on the premise that he actually does know what money is, and copies it for the sake of personal gain.

Naturally, it is hard to imagine that those around us are constantly striving to inflict artificial obligations on us through appeal to a fantastical kind of social mythology. When you think of your sweet, white-haired old mother, who sacrificed everything for you, what could it mean to condemn her for failing to be able to perfectly define the nature and properties of love, a question that baffles even great philosophers?

Well of course it would be grossly unfair to ask the average person to accurately define the true nature of love, just as it would be ridiculous – not to mention dangerous – to grab the average man on the street and ask him to perform your appendectomy.

It certainly is unfair to judge people by standards that they can scarcely be aware of. However, it is not at all unfair to judge people according to the standards that they themselves have set. I cannot alone determine at what price you will sell me your car – but if you yourself put the price in the window, it is not unreasonable for me to expect you to honour it.

Thus when people use the word “love,” they are “putting the price in the window.” Love of course is considered to be a feeling of high regard for someone, and is either based upon the virtues or characteristics of the loved person, or it is not. If love is not based on the characteristics of the loved person, then it must be based on the willpower of the person who loves him or her.

If love is based on the willpower of the person who is “doing the loving,” then it must be considered virtuous to love so altruistically. If it is not virtuous to love so altruistically, then there is nothing beneficial or positive in the interaction, since neither the person loving nor the person being loved possesses any positive characteristics. We might as well define obsessive stalking as “love.”

If it is “good” for Person A to love Person B despite Person B’s lack of lovable qualities, then this “good action” is either a universal principle, or a merely personal preference. If I say that ice cream is “good,” I do not mean that ice cream acts with virtue, courage and integrity. If I say that a particular action is “good,” then it must be good for more than one person, if it is to rise above merely personal preference. However, if it is “good” to love someone who has no lovable qualities, then an instant paradox is created.

If I have no lovable qualities, then I do not possess “goodness,” since goodness is a lovable quality. If it is “good” to love someone despite an absence of lovable qualities, then by definition I am incapable of loving someone, since I lack goodness. In this way, two opposing moral rules are created, which cannot be valid. Person A does “good” by loving Person B, who is incapable of goodness. Person B can then only enable Person A’s “goodness” by receiving without giving – thus what is good for Person A is not good for Person B.

Again, though this can be complicated to examine syllogistically, it is an argument that adult children of a co-dependent parent have continuously. If I see my mother perpetually sacrificing everything for my father, I will continually ask her that if sacrificing everything for your spouse is good, then why does my father not sacrifice everything for her? Why is such sacrifice only ever good for her? Why does my father get off scot-free?

It cannot be considered “good” to love someone who lacks lovable qualities. Love, then, is a form of payment for virtue.

I must confess that I understood this at the age of thirteen, when I was a very shallow young man. In school, word got around that I was going to ask a girl to a dance. My criteria, sadly, was solely based on physical attractiveness. When my classmates cornered me and pestered me to reveal whom I was going to ask out, I finally mentioned the girl’s name, and was greeted with rather shocked silence. This girl, while admittedly attractive, was considered rather coarse and unintelligent.

“Why would you ask her?” a friend demanded.

“Uh, because of her… personality,” I stammered, convincing no one.

Why was it that, even at such a tender age, I felt the need to invent virtue as the basis for my desire? Would it have been wrong to say, “She’s kinda purdy!” and be satisfied with that?

And the looks in the faces of the people around me were very interesting. It was not so much that they knew that I was lying – that much was obvious. It is more that they knew why I was lying – and they actually had some sympathy for that, I think.

They knew that I was lying because it is easier to make up “good” reasons for wanting the wrong thing than to actually want the right thing.
And this lesson we have been well taught by our teachers - but I will get into that later.

When I was about eleven, I stole some money from my brother to buy a book. He suspected me of the theft, and spent a good deal of time and energy cross-examining me as to where I’d gotten the money to afford the book. He never could prove that I stole the money, and I stonewalled and evaded with fairly decent ability.

There are three things that I remember very strongly from that long afternoon.
#I was not troubled fundamentally about stealing, but only worried about getting caught.
#If someone had asked me if stealing were wrong, I would have said “yes” – and mean it.
#I was not worried about that blatant contradiction.

In other words, I knew that stealing was wrong, but that knowledge was a mere abstraction, like knowing how many moons Jupiter has, or the name of the drummer for Led Zeppelin. I believed that stealing was wrong – but what that really meant was that I knew that I would get punished if I did not say that stealing was wrong. So I said it aloud, like a magical spell that wards off punishment, like any pagan.

It was similar to how I would chant out my times tables, before I had any real understanding of arithmetic. The sentence was not “Yes, I know that stealing is wrong, but I wanted a book!” It was even less related than that: “Stealing is wrong, and I wanted a book.” Just two facts, a principle and a desire, not even orbiting one another…

So did I know that stealing is wrong? Sure, I think I did, but for me, “wrong” just meant, “disapproved of.” By this time, I had lived in a number of different countries and classes, and I knew that “wrong” was not objective, because “disapproved of” varied so enormously from place to place. And obviously I myself “approved of” taking the money from my brother, because I did it. So there was my little “approval,” and lots of other people’s “disapproval,” and I thought:well, if other people get to disapprove of things that I prefer, then surely I have the right to approve of things that they do not prefer.

Logical, you may say. Amoral, but logical. And I would have to agree.

But the important issue is that I knew the rules, then I broke the rules by applying them to myself, and so I just made up new rules. This is, I believe, far more common than is generally admitted.

And so we come to the fundamental question: how responsible are we in the face of our own hypocrisies?

=== The Open Cage… ===
I’d like you to imagine a man standing in the middle of a large meadow. You spend some time watching this man, and it doesn’t take you very long to notice that he paces back and forth in a small square, about ten feet on either side. That’s all. Just ten feet.

After a few hours of watching him do this, you walk up to him. When you reach forward to shake his hand, however, your fingers are burned by a strong electrical shock from an invisible barrier.

Startled – and hurt – you cry out. The man looks up.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I just ran into this invisible wall which gave me a hell of a shock!” you cry.

He frowns. “I didn’t see anything.”

You blink. “Really? You’ve never heard or seen or felt this invisible barrier?”

He shakes his head slowly. “What invisible barrier?”

“The one that surrounds you – the one that keeps you penned in this little ten foot square!”

“What little ten foot square?” he demands. “There’s no little ten foot square! I can go wherever the hell I want!”

“No you can’t!”

“Who the hell are you to tell me where I can and cannot go? I decide that!”

“I’m not telling you where you can and cannot go – I’m just telling you what you are actually doing!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Well, I’ve been watching you for the past few hours, and you’re standing in the middle of this great big meadow, and yet all you do is pace back and forth ten feet.”

“I can go anywhere I damn well please!” the man repeats angrily.

“You say that, but all you do is pace around and around in a little ten foot square! If you can go anywhere you please, why don’t you just try taking one extra step?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he growls. “Now get the hell off my damn property!”

“Wait – I can show you!” You reach down and pick up some grass. You throw it towards the man. A few feet away from his face, the blades of grass burst into flame and evaporate. You do this several times, proving definitively that there is in fact an invisible force field that surrounds him, roughly ten feet by ten feet.

“Do you see?” you ask eagerly. “Do you see that you are in an invisible cage?”

“Get the hell off my property, you madman!” he cries, shaking with rage.

“But you must know that you are in an invisible cage,” you cry out. “You must know that, because you never try to go outside these walls. You must have at one time tried to break free of this cage, and were burned by the electric shock, which is why you never take more than a few steps before turning around! Don’t you see?”

He pulls out a gun, screams that he has a principle of shooting trespassers, and, quite sensibly, you run away.

This is the great paradox of attempting to teach people what they already know. Everybody claims complete freedom, but paces back and forth, trapped in a little square. Everyone is surrounded by the invisible cages of culture and mythology, and denies it completely. The evidence of these cages is very clear, because people always turn back just before they hit them. But then they deny that these cages exist.

Everybody acts as if they are perfectly free, and perfectly enslaved at the same time. Nobody admits to being in a prison, but everyone shuffles around in an invisible ten by ten cell.

In the same way, everyone tells you that they are free, but in fact everyone is trapped in little tiny cells of allowable conversation. Everybody tells you they love you, but strenuously avoids talking about what love is, or what about you they love.

Everyone tells you to be good, but they have no idea what goodness is – and will savage you for even having the temerity to ask the question.
Everybody talks about the truth, but the real truth is that nobody can talk about the truth – what it is, how it is defined, how it is verified, and its value.

== Responsibility ==
If the man in the meadow were put into his cage when he was a toddler, he would have discovered the limits of his confinement – painfully – when he was very young. It is entirely conceivable that he would end up just avoiding his invisible prison bars, to retain his illusion of freedom, and repress the pain of imprisonment. If you cannot escape your prison, then you might as well imagine that you’re free.

The man is not responsible for being put in the cage when he was a toddler, and he is not responsible for his resulting repression, and he is not responsible for not testing the bars of his cage, but instead turning away before he touches them.

There are two things, however, that he is responsible for.

The first thing that he is responsible for denying is clear and tangible evidence that contradicts his belief. There are two primary pieces of evidence: the grass that bursts into flame, and the fact that although he says he is free, he never takes more than a few steps in any direction before turning around.

The second thing that he is responsible for is shutting down the conversation when it makes him uncomfortable.

The essence of wisdom is learning the value of “staying in the conversation,” even when it makes you uncomfortable.

Especially when it makes you uncomfortable.

== Falsehood and the Conversation ==
The most important thing in life is not to lie to other people – honesty is the most fundamental virtue. Now, just about every time a philosopher brings up the virtue of honesty, a blizzard of questions blocks his progress – questions designed to find the fuzzy areas at the limits of ethical behaviour, such as “Is it okay to lie if someone holds a gun to your head and demands to know where your wife is so that he can kill her?”

This is all very interesting, but absolutely irrelevant to the world as it is.

In the world as it is, we are so far from being able to tell the truth to each other that focusing on the fuzzy areas of practical honesty is like asking a man who stumbles into an emergency room clutching his own severed arm if he needs a manicure. Or, to take another medical analogy, I view philosophers as essential doctors in the middle of a terrible plague. All around us, people are writhing and dying, and we must work as hard as we can to save as many people as we can – with the full knowledge that very few people will make it. Most modern philosophers, however, are sitting in the midst of all this suffering, and debating what the best course of action should be if a patient presents with a heart attack, diabetes, and a hangnail, and is struck by lightning while being examined.

My response to that is: when we have reached a world that is so healthy that the once-a-century problems are the most important things that we can deal with, we shall scarcely need philosophy at all!

Thus let us roll up our sleeves, and try to deal with the plague that is devouring us now, and leave the improbable problems to a future happier time.

The reason that the man in the invisible cage above is to blame for his actions is that he was lying to you.

When you began to point the truth out to him, he felt uncomfortable. At first, he seemed genuinely baffled – whether that was a ruse or not, we cannot tell. Then, as the evidence began to mount up, both logically and empirically, he began to get hostile.

Was he lying? Of course he was.

He was lying because he did not tell you that he was feeling uncomfortable, but rather began jabbering about trespassing, cursing, and ended up pulling out a gun.

Was this honest? No. Was this man aware that he was feeling increasingly uncomfortable? Of course. Did he honestly express his discomfort? No. He evaded his own discomfort by attacking you.

As an example, when I sat down with my brother, after I had decided to stop seeing my mother, he presented to me the following argument:

“Stef, you should see mother because if you don’t see her, then she is exercising control over your choices. If you allow the fact that you dislike her to control your actions, she has won, and you have lost an essential freedom.”

“So,” I replied, “if I understand you correctly, you are saying that I should see people that I like because I like them, and I should see people that I dislike because otherwise they will have power over me. In other words, there is no one that I should ever refuse to see.”
As usual, he rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“But let me tell you what bothers me about this family,” I continued. “I strongly feel that I am never allowed to have any real preferences. I mean, I am allowed to have preferences in my own way, but nobody ever respects those preferences and changes their actions. You would prefer that I see mother, and so you are trying to get me to change my actions based on your preferences. However, at the same time, you tell me that my preferences are meaningless, in terms of whom I see. But how can your preferences require a change in my actions, but my preferences should require no changes in my actions?”

Sadly, inevitably, the conversation was over at that point.

It was clear to me even at the time that my brother was intensely uncomfortable with my questions. He telegraphed all the usual signals – pursed lips, eye rolling, tight shrugs and endless frowns. I felt a very strong resistance as I ploughed on, and I asked my brother if he felt uncomfortable. He said that he did not.

This was, of course, the key moment in our interaction. If he had been honest with me, and told me that he felt uncomfortable, we could have talked about his discomfort, and the ways in which that discomfort might have been affecting his position.

By telling me that I was doing something wrong, when what was actually happening was that my choices were causing him discomfort, my brother was lying to me. He was, essentially, trying to manage his own discomfort by inflicting moral commandments upon me. He tried to appeal to my self-interest based on a vague “higher standard,” and when that failed, he disapproved of my “resistance.” My decision not to see our mother any more created great anxiety in him, because it opened up the possibility of choice, where before there had only been an absolute.

This was an essential aspect of our interaction. I think that I will have had a long life if I live to be a hundred years old. If, however, if turns out that technology can now allow us to live to be two hundred years old, a hundred years will no longer seem like such a long life. Where there is no possibility of reaching two hundred years of age, we do not feel anxious if we fail to reach it. If there is no possibility of not seeing your own mother, then we feel far less anxious if we continue to see her, even if, deep down, we do not want to.

However, the moment that somebody says: “I am no longer going to see my mother,” this creates great anxiety within us, because a possibility now exists that deep down we really want which formerly we thought was impossible.

When I made my decision, my brother had two choices about how to best manage his anxiety. He could examine that anxiety and try to understand its source – or, he could attempt to reduce his anxiety by manipulating me into seeing our mother again.

When choice enters into our lives, where formerly we felt there were only absolutes, we feel anxiety, because deep down we know that that choice always existed, but we have been told that it was wrong to think about that choice. Emotionally, this leads us back to our early traumas, through which “culture” was inflicted upon us – and thus to a deep and bitter criticism of our parents and teachers – bringing us right up against the invisible electric fence of mythological punishment.

We really, really do not ever want to go there.

If somebody breaks out of prison, you can either try to break out of prison yourself, or you can help the guards get him back into prison. The tipping point of the decision is what you decide to do with your own anxiety. If you decide to deal with your anxiety as an internal state, related to your core beliefs, your history, your false allegiances to false virtues, then you will be catapulted through the entire cavalcade of growth that is the inevitable result of deciding to stop using others to manage your emotions.

It is a sad reality that, for most people, their prison doesn’t feel like a prison until somebody tries to break out of it. The conclusion they leap to is that the person who has broken out of prison is the one who actually turned it into a prison – by the very act of breaking out of it! It’s madness, of course, but all too common.

When I sat down with my mother, about eight years ago, a very similar interaction occurred, just as you would expect. And, just as you would expect, she was much more efficient than my brother, because she taught him.

The fundamental conversation went this way:

I said: “Mum, I feel that you don’t listen to me.”

My mother replied: “Don’t be silly – of course I listen to you!”

Do you really need any help figuring out the blatant contradiction in this interaction?

I doubt it.

== Exploitation ==
If I am sick, and I need you to donate a kidney to me, I have four general choices:
#I can tell you that I would like you to donate a kidney to me, with no expectation that you must do so.
#I can decide not to ask you for a kidney.
#I can tell you that I really need you to donate a kidney, and you should do it because I want you to.
#I can tell you that it is immoral to refuse to donate a kidney to me, and thus you are ethically obligated to give me your kidney, just as you are ethically obligated to pay back a loan.

In the first case, I am simply expressing my true and honest desire for your kidney. I am not manipulating you. I am not bullying you. I am telling you what I want. My request is not a demand – and my request, fundamentally, is not for your kidney, but for you to understand that I would like your kidney.

This is a crucial difference, which is so easily overlooked. Saying, “I would like your kidney,” is not saying, “Give me your kidney!” Saying, “I would like to be an astronaut,” is not saying, “Make me an astronaut!”

Either I am free to express my thoughts and feelings to you, or I am not. If I am free to do so, then of course I must be free to express what I would prefer you to do, if that is what I think.

If you interpret my preferences as commandments that you must comply with, then you will naturally prefer that I never express a preference. If you hate the taste of ice cream, but every time I said, “I like ice cream,” you had to eat a bowl, you would obviously prefer that I not say “I like ice cream” any more Because my desires enslave you, you must enslave my desires.

The best and most terrible way to enslave another human being is to interpret his desires as commandments. If, every time I express my preferences, you interpret them as commandments, then you must inevitably be led to controlling, minimising, ignoring or attacking my preferences.

In other words, if my desires are commandments, then my preferences are attacks upon you.

And the only antidote to this is curiosity.

== Curiosity ==
The opposite of tyranny is curiosity. The opposite of ignorance is curiosity. The opposite of manipulation is curiosity.
The opposite of immaturity is curiosity, because to be curious is to be wise.

What is the most logical and mature response to the statement: “I would like you to give me your kidney.”?

Is it:
#“Sure, here you go – I even iced it for you.”
#Blank stare.
#“Don’t ask me, it makes me uncomfortable.”
#“How about those Mets?”
#“I told you not to play rugby, you never listen to me, I can’t believe you would have the balls to ask me, how selfish and manipulative can you get?”
#“Tell me more.”

If we really understand the nature of the statement, which is “I have a feeling called ‘I would prefer for you to give me your kidney’,” then together we can examine the nature of that feeling. If I am standing at a bus stop, and a woman next to me says, “Feels like rain,” it would be quite logical for me to ask, if I was curious, “What does that feel like?” Arguing about whether rain was imminent or not would be illogical, because the woman did not say, “It’s about to rain.” What she said was, “Feels like rain,” which is quite different. It is a statement of an inner experience, not an outward prediction, command or expectation.

If I say to you, “I dreamt about an elephant last night,” could you logically disagree with me? You might not be particularly interested in my dream, but it would make precious little sense to dispute my statement. Either I am telling the truth, or I am not. If I am telling the truth, there is nothing to argue about – if I am not, there’s still nothing to argue about, because you will never have one single shred of evidence that I am lying.

Thus when I say to you, “I would like you to give me your kidney,” it’s the first three words that are important, not the last four. But everyone focuses on the last four, considers them a bullying demand, and thus must spend the rest of their mortal existence managing and controlling the first three.

Statements of preference are just statements of inner experience, and if we care about the person who is expressing them, we will be curious about her inner experience.

Thus, to extrapolate to something slightly more generic than kidneys, if you are doing something that bothers me, I have four general choices:
#I can tell you that I am bothered by what you’re doing, with no expectation that you must change your behaviour.
#I can leave the situation.
#I can tell you that what you’re doing bothers me, and that you should stop it because it bothers me.
#I can tell you that what you’re doing is immoral, and you should stop it because it’s wrong.

Of course, if people in general were mature and wise, they would mostly choose what was behind door number one – occasionally, they would leave through door number two for a brief period if they were upset, but they would never open doors three and four.

However, the world is neither wise nor mature, and so children quickly learn that when adults are upset or anxious, it is the children’s behaviour that must always change. If my mother is anxious about me dating, the “solution” is for me not to date. If my father will be embarrassed by my absence from church, I must go to church. If my mother will feel embarrassed if I do not kiss my smelly old grandmother, it’s pucker time! If my mother will feel mortified if I snatch a toy from another child, the solution is for me to “play nicely.”<ref>Of course I really should not snatch toys; the problem is that my mother is not curious why I do so, but merely controls the symptoms, instead of working to understand the cause.</ref>

== Attack ==
When I was fourteen or so, I took a summer school course, desperate to get out of the mental gulag of public school as quickly as humanly possible. I had a brittle and belligerent male teacher, who demanded that we show up on the dot at eight-thirty in the morning, but then would have us sit and read a textbook for the first thirty to forty minutes of the class. He also showed really boring documentaries, spoke in a monotone, and was completely obsessed with JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

Occasionally, I would get very sleepy, and I would put my head down on my desk for a few minutes. I never fell asleep, but it certainly could have looked that way.

After a couple of weeks of classes, I got up to do a presentation on slavery. Just before I began, this teacher held up his hand and ordered everyone to put their heads down on their desk.

All the other children were pretty confused, as you can imagine – as was I. After a few minutes of bullying and ordering, all the children in the room put their heads down on their desks. My face was very pale, and I was alarmed, to say the least.

When everyone’s head was down, the teacher turned and literally screamed at me: “Do you see how it feels? Do you see how it feels when you’re trying to teach people something, and they put their heads down on their desks? DO YOU SEE HOW IT FEELS? THAT’S RUDE! DON’T DO THAT!” His veins were literally bulging out of his neck.

And then, of course, he demanded that I deliver my presentation.

What was going on here?

The amazing thing about people who abuse children, is that they really have no idea how the children actually see them. I knew that he had all the power, but it really was a very sad spectacle, and I got a very strong impression of a futile, self-loathing and pathetic life. Perhaps they imagine that bullying children makes them look strong, but the degree of contempt that I felt – and feel – towards those who bully the helpless is almost beyond words, and I do not think that I am alone in that. When we think of the radioactive contempt that teenagers often have towards their parents and other authority figures, I think it’s fairly easy to see that bullying children does not generate respect – any more than beating your wife generates love.

Let’s call this teacher Bob, since I have no idea what his name is, after all these years. Clearly, Bob did not feel like a very good teacher, because a good teacher would regard an exhausted student with curiosity. I could be tired because I cannot sleep, or have problems at home, or have a hormonal imbalance, or some other reason that has precious little to do with his teaching ability – or I could be tired because he is a boring teacher.

If Bob shows no curiosity as to why I am tired, then he will never know why. If I am sick, or stressed,<ref>I was working three jobs at this point in my childhood.</ref> he might be able to help me in some way – or at least, he will have established that it is not because he is a boring teacher.

If he finds out that I am tired because he is a boring teacher, then obviously that can be painful, but I have absolutely no doubt that Bob would prefer to be an exciting teacher than a boring one. If he had invested the time to try and figure out – with me – why I was tired, then he might have been able to learn how to become a more exciting teacher, which would have been in line with his own values, and so made him happier.
The truth of the matter, of course, as we have seen above, is that, deep down, Bob was absolutely convinced that he was a terrible teacher. When I put my head down on my desk, it confirmed his worst fears, which he violently rejected.

When we understand the power of mythology, it is clear how little Bob understood about what I was doing, and what I was communicating.
When I put my head down on my desk, I was not saying, “Bob, you are a terrible teacher.” I was not saying, “I am putting my head down on my desk to defy your authority.” I was not saying, “I am putting my head down on my desk because I am a rude and selfish individual who cares nothing for anyone else’s feelings.”

When I put my head down on my desk, I was only saying: “I am tired.”

Everything else was just mythology – paranoid and vicious fairy tales.

Everything else was Bob’s invention, and he invented everything else in order to strenuously avoid being curious.

Why? Why was he so terrified of curiosity?

It’s simple.

The reason that we are not curious is that we already know the answers, and we do not like them.

== Wisdom and Pain ==
Pain is our body’s way of telling us what we need to deal with, of helping us prioritise our actions relative to health. Our body does not report on organs that are functioning well, but the moment that a tooth gets infected, we know all about it!

In other words, pain tells us what we need to do. If our tooth hurts, we need to go to a dentist. Pain informs us of the problems we need to solve.

If we think of our life before anaesthetics, it’s easy to understand that we usually had to accept an increase in pain in order to become healthier. An infected tooth had to be pulled out. Nowadays, we sometimes have to go through the pain of chemotherapy in order to treat cancer.

This is the challenge of pain – we do not like it, but often have to accept a temporary increase of it in order to become healthier.

If I break my leg, it really hurts – that’s why I stop moving it. After my leg has healed, to regain full strength and mobility, I have to endure the pain of physiotherapy.

Injuries can also make us stronger. If I survive a heart attack, I may choose to lose weight, eat better, exercise and so on – I may in fact be healthier than if I had never had a heart attack. Similarly, if I break my leg, my leg can end up stronger, as a result of the exercise required to restore strength and mobility. Losing a tooth can generate a desire for better oral hygiene.

There are several key differences between physical pain and psychological pain, however, which you really need to understand if you want to become healthier and happier in the long run.

The first and most important difference is that psychological pain can be transferred from one person to another. If my tooth hurts, I cannot transfer my toothache to you – but quite the opposite is true for psychological pain, at least in the short run.

If I feel anxiety about what you are doing, I can temporarily reduce that anxiety by forcing you to change your behaviour, just as I can temporarily reduce the pain of a toothache by taking painkillers – the difference being that when I take painkillers, you do not feel my toothache.

The transfer of psychological pain almost always occurs in a hierarchical relationship, such as parent-child, boss-employee, a dominant/submissive marriage and so on. Helplessness and dependence – real for children, fantasied for adults – are required to be on the receiving end of this kind of parasitical emotional exploitation.

This is the main reason why hegemonic or hierarchical power relations exist. We do not throw our garbage into a dump because the dump just happens to be there – the dump only exists because we need to throw our garbage somewhere. In the same way, we do not exploit people because they’re helpless; we make them helpless in order to exploit them.

Bob did not end up abusing children because he had power as a teacher – he sought power as a teacher in order to abuse children.
Power does not create corruption; the desire to corrupt creates power.

When we are in an agony of psychological distress, it is utterly counter-intuitive to want to feel more of that agony – just as it is counter-intuitive to want to pull out a tooth that already hurts, or start chemotherapy when you do not feel sick.

Yet that is precisely what is required, if we wish to become healthy.

If I choose not to go to physiotherapy after my broken leg heals, I am the only one who has to live with the resulting weakness and lack of mobility. If I choose to manage my anxiety by attacking the helpless, however, I gain temporary relief from my discomfort only by inflicting my distress on others.

And this is how the entire system reproduces itself.

In essence, by attempting to humiliate me so horrendously, Bob was attempting to infect me with the virus of abuse. Because he was not mature or wise enough to take ownership for his own emotions, he inevitably believed that I was the source of his anxiety. Since I was “inflicting” anxiety upon him, I was acting in a “hostile” manner, just as if I were injecting him with a poison – and thus his attack on me was a twisted form of self-defence.

Furthermore, by inflicting his “humiliation” on me, Bob was demanding that I have empathy for his feelings – but if empathy is a value, why would he not have empathy for my exhaustion?

Without a doubt, Bob had been ignored and repeatedly humiliated as a child, and forced to comply with the irrational whims of those who held power over him. The natural pattern-making habits of his brain thus created a universal commandment: “You must obey those in power!” – or, more accurately: “Disobeying those in power will cause you to be attacked and humiliated.”

There are three major components to the psychological agony that results from the establishment of this principle.

The first is the shame and embarrassment that results from being humiliated.

The second is the horror of being trapped in the power of those who act abusively.

The third is the rage that results from being told that such abuse is actually virtuous – “This is for your own good!”

When we are abused as children, we are put into a terrible predicament, because we are utterly dependent on our abusers. A form of the “Stockholm syndrome” sets in, and we force ourselves to “respect” those who abuse us. This is an entirely sensible survival strategy, because the horror of knowing that we will be under the abusive control of our parents for years to come would be too great for us to bear. Also, since we are punished for not showing respect, it is easier just to “respect” them rather than continually have to pretend to – which they will doubtless see through, and punish.

Furthermore, since abuse is always cloaked with self-righteous moral justifications,<ref>“It is morally wrong to disobey me!”</ref> we also experience an existential horror, because we know that our parents are using moral terms – and our own desire for goodness – to humiliate, control and bully us. In other words, they use goodness in the service of evil, which is the worst corruption of all.

Thus we are inevitably led to invert rational moral standards – bullying the helpless inevitably becomes virtue.

== Absolutes ==
We can choose not to eat, but we cannot erase our body’s need for food. We can choose to jump off a cliff, but we cannot choose to defy gravity.

We can pretend that lies are true, and that vices are virtues, but we cannot turn lies into truth, or vices into virtues.

We cannot erase the truth within ourselves; we can only suppress and distort it.

Fundamentally, philosophy is not invention, but excavation; not exploration, but archaeology.

When we are abused as children, as Bob surely was, we desperately try to numb our pain by imagining that our abusers are virtuous. Deep down, we know the truth though, which is why our distortions cause us such agony in the long run.

We can use other people to “manage” our anxieties as surely as we can use drugs and alcohol to “manage” our anxieties.

The disparity between the mythologies we must invent in order to survive our childhoods and the reality we know to be true is the most fundamental source of our depression and anxiety.

In other words, fantasy is the scar tissue of abuse.

When Bob saw me put my head on my desk, I “created” anxiety in him because I was not acting on a premise that he believed to be a moral absolute: “You must respect and obey those in power!” His hysterical reaction to my innocuous doziness resulted not because he believed that I should obey those in power, but because, deep down, he knew that it was in fact immoral to obey those in power – and because he also knew that if someone in power demands obedience, it is because that person is not moral.

In other words, he avoided the pain of his own abuse by pretending that he was not abused – by pretending that his abusers were moral. He did this by transforming the control that was inflicted on him from a practical principle of obedience to a moral standard of perfection.

=== Justification as Prediction ===
Imagine that I live in England, and for decades I have been ranting about immigrants who do not take the time to learn English. “How can you come and live in a place and never take the trouble to learn the language? It’s disrespectful, it’s rude, and it’s cloistered. Anybody who wishes to be a decent citizen must take the trouble to learn the language!”

I publish countless articles on this topic, I make public speeches on it, and end friendships with those who disagree with me.

In other words, I am really committed to this idea.

Then, imagine that I move to Sweden. I live in Sweden for a year, and then come back to England for a visit.

“So, how’s Sweden?” you ask.

“Great!” I reply.

“And how’s your Swedish coming along?”

“Oh, I haven’t learned any Swedish, why would I?”

Would that surprise you? Would you feel that I was being rather hypocritical? Would you feel a strong desire to cross-examine me more closely about my strong and openly professed belief that the inhabitants of a country are morally obligated to learn the language?

If I explain the inconsistency between my beliefs and my actions by saying that it turns out it is very hard to learn a new language, and that it is not really necessary if you live within the confines of an expatriate cultural group – would you feel compelled to point out that this is the exact opposite of the position that I have publicly and vociferously taken for many years?

I imagine that you would suggest it would be appropriate for me to write a follow-up article, repudiating my earlier views, based on my new understanding.

Would my blanket refusal to do any such thing affect your opinion of me?

This is the cycle of abuse.

When we, as children, justify the abuses of our parents in order to survive the situation, we are setting up moral absolutes about the right and proper use of power. “It is moral for those who have power to hurt those who do not have power, in order to protect them, guide them, or ‘toughen them up.’”

This is how we justify and survive the harm done to us.

This is why we so often repeat and re-inflict the harm done to us.

If I were a publicly xenophobic Brit who moved to Sweden, I would be perfectly aware of all the criticisms I would face if I did not try to learn Swedish. I would know that I would either have to learn Swedish – and learn it well – or publicly repudiate all my earlier opinions.

“Flip-flopping” on principles is very humiliating, because everyone who proclaims a truth inevitably claims that that truth is based on reason and evidence. No one puts forward a “truth” claiming it is based on mere unsubstantiated opinion – because then, of course, it would not be the truth.

Thus someone who claims “the truth” always says that this truth is merely derived from reason and evidence – even those who claim “faith” as the basis for their beliefs say that faith provides evidence, and thus it is rational to believe truths based on faith.

If someone who claims a truth later has to completely reverse his position, he can only credibly do so if new evidence arises. For instance, if it turns out that the universe is in fact powered by invisible pixies on treadmills, I will have to revise some of my opinions on reality – but only because new evidence has come to light.

If, however, no new evidence has come to light, then clearly evidence cannot be believably cited as the justification for one’s earlier position. What becomes clear is that one’s earlier position was based on prejudice, but that reason and evidence were cited as justifications.
This is an essential point – and very similar to the ethical and cultural hypocrisies discussed above.

When I cite reason and evidence as the justifications for my beliefs, I am affirming the power of reason and evidence. In other words, I fully accept and respect the primacy of reason and evidence in determining the truth-value of beliefs.

If it turns out that I had no real reason or evidence for my beliefs, then I am engaged in the same kind of terrible hypocrisy perpetrated by those who use moral arguments for immoral ends. I am using reason and evidence to support subjective bigotry.

This hypocrisy lies at the root of my public and private pronouncements regarding truth. If it comes to light that I have been using the values of reason and evidence to promote bigotry and prejudice, then not only have all my prior statements become worse than useless, but I stand revealed as a hypocrite, a fraud and a manipulator.

All my credibility is shot. All my prior statements become examples not of empirical truth, but of rank hypocrisy.

Not good.

This is exactly what happens when we maintain our childhood justifications for our parents’ abuses into adulthood.

If we believe that the abuse of power is moral, we will inevitably be led to abuse power. If I go to Sweden, but do not learn Swedish, then I will have to lie and prevaricate, or pretend that I have learned Swedish, or am about to learn Swedish and so on. Or, I will have to enter the magical land of “this is just somehow different,” which will inevitably require that I substitute aggression for consistency when questioned.
We replicate what we praise. Our justifications guide our lives as surely as train tracks guide a train. The lies we believe today are the lives we will live tomorrow.

The teacher who humiliated me did so because he believed that that’s what those in power must do.

Almost everyone, when faced with the choice of hypocrisy or abuse, chooses abuse.

=== Sadism as Salvation ===
If I go to a doctor because I have made myself sick by smoking, and the doctor prescribes a treatment that causes me pain, my doctor is not cruel, but helpful. The doctor does not seek me out and hurt me because he is sadistic, but rather I must seek out the doctor for a cure because I have hurt myself by smoking. I should not resent the doctor for the pain of his cure, but rather thank him for his ability to help me. The doctor is not responsible for my pain. I am.

A child born in a prison will almost inevitably say: “I don’t obey the prison guards because they are sadists with truncheons, but rather because the prison guards are morally virtuous, and trying to help me.”

There is a terrible cost to this belief, as there is to all fantasies.

If my prison guards hit me with truncheons, I must obey them. If I accept that I obey them because they hit me with truncheons, I feel terribly humiliated and helpless, but retain an accurate assessment of the situation. On the other hand, I can choose to reduce my humiliation by imagining not that I comply because I am hit, but rather that I am hit because I disobey. It is not my non-compliance with the guard’s whims that gets me beaten, but rather my non-compliance with moral virtues. The guards do not beat me because they are sadistic – I am beaten because I am evil. The guards are not responsible for beating me – I am responsible for being beaten. The guards are not trying to humiliate me; they are trying to help me, to make me a better person, just as the doctor is trying to help me by making me healthy again.

Do you see how the agony of moral corruption can be transferred from one person to another?

If my parents beat me not because they are bad, but rather because I am bad, I can retain some sense of honour and control within an abusive and hopeless situation.

If, however, I retain this fantasy after I become an adult – after I gain power over others – then my survival strategy will become exploitive destruction. The equation of abuse with virtue that formerly allowed me to survive now corrupts me. I have become what I originally feared and despised.

Thus, when my actions conflicted with Bob’s belief that it was virtuous to obey those in power, I created great anxiety in him, and triggered his defences, by triggering all his memories of being abused.

I was creating a choice where he believed there was only an absolute. I was also acting in an “immoral” manner, and he had been taught as a child that it is moral to attack someone who is acting in an “immoral” manner.

Thus, to defend his fantasies about his parents’ virtue, to ward off the growing anxiety and horror he felt about the lies he had to invent to survive his own abuse, to crush the freedom that I possessed and which he did not, to legitimise a false moral absolute – and, fundamentally, to both re-create his parents’ abuse, and to be the “bad” person his parents claimed him to be – all in order to justify their abuse – he attacked me.

If I had never understood this, I would very likely have become Bob, and passed along my own abuse.

If I had taken Bob’s abuse personally, I would have absorbed an agony that I would have inevitably inflicted on others, most likely children.

But Bob’s abuse had no more to do with me than my sleepiness had to do with Bob.

He lashed out at me because he knew the truth deep down, but could not accept it.

He tried to humiliate me because, in his own mind, one of us had to be humiliated – and I started it!

He did evil in order to protect the “virtue” of evil.

And it is time for us – all of us, around the world – to stop.

== How To Change ==
I was originally planning for this book to be longer, but as I reached this point in the text, I began to feel a growing anxiety, which was hard for me to understand. I thought it might be because I had started this book without a plan, and was losing my way. As my wife and I reread the book, though, it was clear that it flowed quite well.

Last night, we went for a walk, and discussed the content and form of this book. In just over sixteen months, I have produced over eight hundred podcasts, so it’s not as if I am anywhere close to running out of things to talk about!

However, when you have been immersed in a discipline for a quarter-century, it can be hard to remember what it’s like starting out. I am now quite sure that my anxiety stems from a concern that a longer book would be too hard to digest. When you want to eat a dessert, five pies are not better than one pie.

We will surely speak again, but I think that we have spoken enough for now.

The ideas in this book will change your life if you think about them, and act upon them. The purpose of philosophy is not thought, but action – just as the purpose of medicine is not treatment, but health.

These ideas are in your mind now, and will never go away. You will no more be able to unlearn these truths than you will be able to unlearn that two plus two make four. Thus it is essential that your journey does not stop with reading this book. It is essential that philosophy be a conversation in your life – that you talk about your experience of these ideas with those around you, no matter how terrifying it is.

This book is not a call to meditation, but to action.

In a world full of falsehoods, the truth will isolate you if you do not stay in the conversation.

So – go and live the truth by speaking the truth.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/OTPDF Digital version]
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/OT Audio version]
*[http://www.lulu.com/browse/book_view.php?fCID=1052013 Print version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:Practical Anarchy

2010-12-01T03:23:47Z

Anarchei: Added category

'''''Practical Anarchy''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]] written in 2008. It was preceded by ''[[Everyday Anarchy]]'', and followed by ''[[Achieving Freedom]]''. In the first part of the book Molyneux establishes several principles and a methodology for the rest of the book. In the second part of the book the reasoning is discussed, with a large section devoted to frequently asked questions about anarchism, as well as arguments against the state and arguments for alternatives to government. In the third part of the book Molyneux provides examples of various alternatives that could be possible in a stateless society, such as roads, health care, and money. The last part draws conclusions and argues for a future free of government.

== Contents ==
*[[Practical Anarchy/1|Part One: Methodology]]
*[[Practical Anarchy/2|Part Two: Reasoning]]
*[[Practical Anarchy/3|Part Three: Examples]]
*[[Practical Anarchy/4|Part Four: Conclusions]]

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/PAPDF Digital version]
*[http://fdrurl.com/PA Audio version]
*[http://www.lulu.com/content/2935951 Print version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour

2010-12-01T03:23:17Z

Anarchei: Added category

'''''Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]] written in 2007. The book is a framework for evaluating moral and ethical rules regarding human actions.

== Contents ==
*[[Universally Preferable Behaviour/1|Forward]]
*[[Universally Preferable Behaviour/2|Introduction]]
*[[Universally Preferable Behaviour/3|Part One: Theory]]
*[[Universally Preferable Behaviour/4|Part Two: Application]]
*[[Universally Preferable Behaviour/5|Part Three: Practice]]
*[[Universally Preferable Behaviour/6|Conclusions]]

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/UPBPDF Digital version]
*[http://fdrurl.com/UPBAudio Audio version]
*[http://www.lulu.com/content/1270751 Print version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/5

2010-12-01T02:33:01Z

Anarchei: Added content

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Part Three: Practice
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/4|Part Two: Application]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/6|Conclusions]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== 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 down-town 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, analogising 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 visualised 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:
#Proposition X is true because it is rational.
#Proposition Y is false because it is irrational.
#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 "Alternative 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.<ref>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.</ref>

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.”<ref>Let’s not even get started on the logical nightmare of the truth value contained in the statement “error equals truth.”</ref>

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.”<ref>This argument tends also not to work very well with maths 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.</ref>

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 non-existence 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 recognised 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-defence 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 “two plus two equals five” 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 one thousand kilometres 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 defence 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 defence, 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.<ref>See ''[[Practical Anarchy]]''.</ref>

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 judgement 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 colour to paint my house, and my solution is to sign a contract with a painter allowing him to choose the colour 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 centralised 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?<ref>See [[Federal Reserve]].</ref>

Logically, there are four possibilities as to the mixture of good and evil people in the world:
#All men are moral.
#All men are immoral.
#The majority of men are immoral, and a minority moral.
#The majority of men are moral, and a minority immoral.<ref>A perfect balance of good and evil is practically impossible.</ref>

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.<ref>This is the current situation in democracies, of course.</ref> 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.<ref>See Plato’s ''Republic''.</ref>

This situation, while interesting theoretically, breaks down logically because:
#The evil majority would quickly outvote the minority or overpower them through a coup;
#There is no way to ensure that only good people would always run the government; and,
#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 defence of the government is to imagine that any collective moral judgements being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If fifty percent of people are evil, then at least fifty percent of people ruling over them are also evil.<ref>Probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power.</ref> 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.<ref>For a more detailed discussion of the role that parents play in inculcating the fantasy that “power equals virtue,” see ''[[On Truth]]''.</ref>

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 Organisations (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 centralised 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.<ref>See [[Practical Anarchy/2#War, Profit, and the State|War, profit, and the state]]</ref>

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 decentralised 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?

Organised 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 decentralised 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 institutionalised violence.

Throughout the world, rulers are a very small percentage of the population. How can it be possible for one to two percent 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 fifty percent 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 revolutionised physics by claiming – and proving – that the speed of light was constant.

We can revolutionise 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 recognise 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!

== 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 organising 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 organisation and continuance of society than “gods” are required for the organisation 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 civilisation 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.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/4

2010-12-01T02:07:59Z

Anarchei: Added content

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Part Two: Application
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/3|Part One: Theory]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/5|Part Three: Practice]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC}}

== 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:
#It is good (universally preferable and enforceable through violence, such as “don’t murder”).
#It is aesthetically positive (universally preferable but not enforceable through violence, such as “politeness” and “being on time”).
#It is personally positive (neither universally preferable nor enforceable, such a predilection for eating ice cream).
#It is neutral, or has no ethical or aesthetic content, such as running for a bus.
#It is personally negative (predilection for not eating ice cream).
#It is aesthetically negative (“rudeness” and “being late”).
#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 prioritise 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-defence; theft by the problem of starvation or “stealing back” – but one can never rape in self-defence; 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.

=== 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 any more, 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 one hundred dollars 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.

=== 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.<ref>This is very different from a physical assault, which destroys your capacity for free choice.</ref>

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.

=== Personally Positive ===
Perhaps rape is akin to a merely personal preference.<ref>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.</ref>

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?<ref>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.</ref>

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.

=== Morally Neutral ===
As discussed above, rape cannot be a morally neutral action, since it is a preference that is enforced upon another.

=== 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.

=== Aesthetically Negative ===
Perhaps rape is an aesthetically negative action, like “being late” – the flip-side 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.<ref>We can avoid situations which increase the likelihood of rape, but we cannot avoid a rape in progress.</ref> 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-defence, but at the expense of also allowing gun play in the opposition of, say, rudeness.

Thus rape cannot be an ANA.

Which leaves only…

=== 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-defence.

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 recognise 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 judgements 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 any time 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 any time 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 maths that explains how we are able to instinctively catch a ball, and that is a necessary start.

=== Self-Defence? ===
We have skirted over the issue of self-defence 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-defence 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 films, 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 defence 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 grey 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 Grey 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 ten dollar 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 eighteen years. This means, of course, that at the stroke of midnight between a man’s seventeenth year and eighteenth 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 eighteen he is biologically very different than he was at the age of ten, 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 sixty-five is mentally scarcely more than a little child – a man with an IQ of one hundred is an average adult. If we say that a man with an IQ of eighty becomes responsible, then we are by definition saying that a man with an IQ of seventy-nine 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 fifty percent property rights.

If I argue: “Men only have fifty percent 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 fifty percent property rights, then clearly I only have fifty percent control over my own body – if I put forward the above sentence, then clearly I am only in control of fifty percent of that sentence, since I only have fifty percent control over my voice. Who, then, is responsible for the other fifty percent 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 “fifty percent ownership of the body” problem, and say that human beings only have fifty percent 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 fifty percent ownership over external objects. Thus you must immediately find somebody with whom you can share the lawnmower. This brings your “just” ownership down to twenty-five percent. However, your new co-owner cannot have the right to twenty-five percent of the lawnmower, because he only has fifty percent rights for whatever ownership he possesses – thus he must find somebody to take fifty percent of the twenty-five percent that he has – and so on and so on and so on.

The problem with any theory that argues for less than one hundred percent 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 one hundred percent 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 one hundred percent 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 one hundred percent 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 Forth 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 two hundred dollars, 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 two hundred dollars, 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 twenty dollars, and Bob has a lighter, and Doug offers Bob twenty dollars for that lighter, and then takes the lighter but does not give Bob the twenty dollars, 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 fulfilment 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 “grey 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-defence, just as it is moral to use violence in self-defence It is hard to think of a situation where one would have to “be late” in self-defence, 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-defence, and as morally acceptable as the use of violence in self-defence
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 meeting at seven o’clock in the morning – it’s quite another to attempt to convince you that we in fact scheduled the meeting for eight o’clock in the morning, when I know that this was not the case.

Attacking your confidence in your own mind<ref>Sometimes called “gas-lighting,” after the old movie.</ref> 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 a value 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-Defence ===
The concept of self-defence should not be taken for granted. If we assume that there is no such thing as self-defence, or that self-defence is never a valid action, then the framework of UPB undoes that assumption very quickly.

If there is no such thing as self-defence, 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-defence, 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-defence 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 archaeologists. 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-defence is always wrong, what results?

Well, we create another paradox. Self-defence is the use of violence to prevent violence. If self-defence 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-defence 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-defence cannot be “evil,” since evil by definition can be prevented through force. However, self-defence 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-defence 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-defence is morally evil, which cannot stand according to UPB.

However, you might argue, does not the proposition that self-defence 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-defence 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-defence.

=== 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 recognising 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-defence, which is fully supported by the framework of UPB, since the right of self-defence 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-defence, 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-defence for someone else – and that right becomes even stronger if that person cannot act in his own self-defence, 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-defence, for themselves and for others – since it is a universal right – then anyone can act to defend children. Since everyone must fulfil voluntary obligations, and having children is a voluntary obligation, parents must fulfil 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 generalised – 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 judgements 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 “grey 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.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/6

2010-12-01T01:29:23Z

Anarchei: Conclusions

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Conclusions
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/5|Part Three: Practice]]
| next =
| notes =
}}

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.

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/5

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Anarchei: Created page with table of contents

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Anarchei: Created page with table of contents

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/3

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Anarchei: /* The Beast */

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Part One: Theory
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/2|Introduction]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/4|Part Two: Application]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== 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.<ref>If you do not value truth, you would never be in this debate – or any other debate – in the first place!</ref>

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 realisation 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 ninety-year-old would scarcely be considered good health for a twenty-year-old. The definition of a long life is very different now than it was five hundred years ago.

This does not mean, however, that the concept of “health” is entirely relative and subjective. A ten-year-old dying of leukaemia is unhealthy by any definition – just as a twenty-year-old marathon runner is healthy by any definition. Currently, a man who lives to ninety has statistically had a long life, though that would change if medical technology suddenly allowed us to live to be two hundred.

As our definition of “health” expands, it does not invalidate earlier definitions, but rather extends them. If medical technology advances to allow ninety-year-olds to win marathons, then our definition of what is healthy for the aged will change – but that does not mean that the twenty-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”.

[[Image:Wingdings.png]]

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 fulfil 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 maths 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:
#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.<ref>Rational consistency, or internal logic.</ref>
#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.<ref>Empirical evidence, or empiricism.</ref>

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 minus fifty 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 rail-roading 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:
#Internal consistency (logic).
#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 two plus two equals five, since “five” is just another way of describing two plus three, not two plus two, and so to say that two plus two equals five is to say that five equals four, 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 Two, 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 rigour 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 categorised 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.<ref>It will be useful to keep this particular premise in mind, since it will be very important later on.</ref>

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.<ref>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.</ref>

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 fifteenth and sixteenth 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 theorise 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.<ref>In physics, the question is: either universal physical rules are valid, or they are not.</ref>

A rule can be valid if it exists empirically, like gravity, or because it is true, like the equation two plus two equals four.

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:
#Universal
#Logical
#Empirically verifiable
#Reproducible
#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 Proofs ===
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:
#The proposition is: the concept “universally preferable behaviour” must be valid.
#Arguing against the validity of universally preferable behaviour demonstrates universally preferable behaviour.
#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:
#All organisms require universally preferred behaviour to live.
#Man is a living organism.
#Therefore all living men are alive due to the practice of universally preferred behaviour.
#Therefore any argument against universally preferable behaviour requires an acceptance and practice of universally preferred behaviour.
#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:
#For a scientific theory to be valid, it must be supported by empirical observation.
#If the concept of “universally preferable behaviour” is valid, then mankind should believe in universally preferable behaviour.
#All men believe in universally preferable behaviour.
#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:
#Choices are almost infinite.
#Most human beings make very similar choices.
#Therefore not all choices can be equal.
#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:
#Organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behaviour.
#Man is the most successful organism.
#Therefore man must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
#Man’s mind is his most distinctive organ.
#Therefore man’s mind must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
#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 organising 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 one hundred eighty-six thousand kilometres per second, five kilometres 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 Two.

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 practised. 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.<ref>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 Two of this book.</ref>

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.<ref>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 Two.</ref>

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:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
!
!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.<ref>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.</ref>

=== 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 one hundred dollars and then walk away, I cannot justly come up to you in a year and say that you now owe me one hundred dollars, 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 judgements 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 colour 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 recognise 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 five thousand kilometres 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 organised 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 six o’clock 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 judgements 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 under way, 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 minimise 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 “victimisation” 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 analysing 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-defence 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 long-time 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-defence 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 analyse a principle such as the NAP, there are really only seven possibilities: three in the negative, three in the positive, and one neutral:
*The initiation of the use of force is always morally wrong.
*The initiation of the use of force is sometimes morally wrong.
*The initiation of the use of force is never morally wrong.
*The initiation of the use of force has no moral content.
*The initiation of the use of force is never morally right.
*The initiation of the use of force is sometimes morally right.
*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:
#It is universally preferable to initiate the use of force.
#It is universally preferable to not initiate the use of force.
#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 Two, 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.<ref>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.</ref>

=== Grey Areas ===
The fact that certain “grey 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 recognise 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 Grey ===
In the realm of “grey areas,” there are really only three possibilities.
#There are no such things as grey areas.
#Certain grey areas do exist.
#All knowledge is a grey area.

Clearly, option one can be easily discarded. Option three is also fairly easy to discard. The statement “all knowledge is a grey 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 grey areas do exist, and we know that they are grey relative to the areas that are not grey 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 grey 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:
#Everyone would rather steal an apple than starve to death.
#Thus everyone universally prefers stealing apples to death by starvation.
#Thus it is universally preferable to steal apples rather than starve to death.
#Thus survival is universally preferable to property rights.
#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.<ref>Nietzsche’s “will to power” and Rand’s “that which serves man’s life is the good.”</ref>

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 rigour 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 Three 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 one hundred seventy 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 legitimised 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 colours you might want to paint your walls might well be considered a sub-optimal prioritisation.

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 eleven, another boy stole a few dollars from me. Another time, when I was twenty-six, 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 fourteen years, based on the moral theory that “state education is a virtue.”<ref>Or, rather: “forced education is a virtue” – my parents were compelled to pay through taxes, and I was compelled to attend.</ref>

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 prioritisation 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.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/3

2010-12-01T00:20:05Z

Anarchei: /* Lifeboat Scenarios */

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/3

2010-12-01T00:12:21Z

Anarchei: /* Initiation */

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Part One: Theory
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/2|Introduction]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/4|Part Two: Application]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== 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.<ref>If you do not value truth, you would never be in this debate – or any other debate – in the first place!</ref>

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 realisation 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 ninety-year-old would scarcely be considered good health for a twenty-year-old. The definition of a long life is very different now than it was five hundred years ago.

This does not mean, however, that the concept of “health” is entirely relative and subjective. A ten-year-old dying of leukaemia is unhealthy by any definition – just as a twenty-year-old marathon runner is healthy by any definition. Currently, a man who lives to ninety has statistically had a long life, though that would change if medical technology suddenly allowed us to live to be two hundred.

As our definition of “health” expands, it does not invalidate earlier definitions, but rather extends them. If medical technology advances to allow ninety-year-olds to win marathons, then our definition of what is healthy for the aged will change – but that does not mean that the twenty-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”.

[[Image:Wingdings.png]]

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 fulfil 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 maths 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:
#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.<ref>Rational consistency, or internal logic.</ref>
#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.<ref>Empirical evidence, or empiricism.</ref>

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 minus fifty 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 rail-roading 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:
#Internal consistency (logic).
#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 two plus two equals five, since “five” is just another way of describing two plus three, not two plus two, and so to say that two plus two equals five is to say that five equals four, 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 Two, 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 rigour 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 categorised 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.<ref>It will be useful to keep this particular premise in mind, since it will be very important later on.</ref>

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.<ref>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.</ref>

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 fifteenth and sixteenth 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 theorise 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.<ref>In physics, the question is: either universal physical rules are valid, or they are not.</ref>

A rule can be valid if it exists empirically, like gravity, or because it is true, like the equation two plus two equals four.

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:
#Universal
#Logical
#Empirically verifiable
#Reproducible
#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 Proofs ===
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:
#The proposition is: the concept “universally preferable behaviour” must be valid.
#Arguing against the validity of universally preferable behaviour demonstrates universally preferable behaviour.
#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:
#All organisms require universally preferred behaviour to live.
#Man is a living organism.
#Therefore all living men are alive due to the practice of universally preferred behaviour.
#Therefore any argument against universally preferable behaviour requires an acceptance and practice of universally preferred behaviour.
#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:
#For a scientific theory to be valid, it must be supported by empirical observation.
#If the concept of “universally preferable behaviour” is valid, then mankind should believe in universally preferable behaviour.
#All men believe in universally preferable behaviour.
#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:
#Choices are almost infinite.
#Most human beings make very similar choices.
#Therefore not all choices can be equal.
#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:
#Organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behaviour.
#Man is the most successful organism.
#Therefore man must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
#Man’s mind is his most distinctive organ.
#Therefore man’s mind must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
#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 organising 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 one hundred eighty-six thousand kilometres per second, five kilometres 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 Two.

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 practised. 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.<ref>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 Two of this book.</ref>

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.<ref>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 Two.</ref>

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:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
!
!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.<ref>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.</ref>

=== 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 one hundred dollars and then walk away, I cannot justly come up to you in a year and say that you now owe me one hundred dollars, 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 judgements 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 colour 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 recognise 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 five thousand kilometres 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 organised 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 six o’clock 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 judgements 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 under way, 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 minimise 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 “victimisation” 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 analysing 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-defence 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 long-time 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-defence 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 analyse a principle such as the NAP, there are really only seven possibilities: three in the negative, three in the positive, and one neutral:
*The initiation of the use of force is always morally wrong.
*The initiation of the use of force is sometimes morally wrong.
*The initiation of the use of force is never morally wrong.
*The initiation of the use of force has no moral content.
*The initiation of the use of force is never morally right.
*The initiation of the use of force is sometimes morally right.
*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:
#It is universally preferable to initiate the use of force.
#It is universally preferable to not initiate the use of force.
#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 Two, 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 ==

=== Grey Areas ===

=== Shades Of Grey ===

=== Universality And Exceptions ===

=== The Purpose And The Dangers ===

== The Beast ==

=== Propaganda ===

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/3

2010-12-01T00:09:39Z

Anarchei: /* UPB: Ethics Or Aesthetics? */

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Part One: Theory
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/2|Introduction]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/4|Part Two: Application]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== 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.<ref>If you do not value truth, you would never be in this debate – or any other debate – in the first place!</ref>

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 realisation 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 ninety-year-old would scarcely be considered good health for a twenty-year-old. The definition of a long life is very different now than it was five hundred years ago.

This does not mean, however, that the concept of “health” is entirely relative and subjective. A ten-year-old dying of leukaemia is unhealthy by any definition – just as a twenty-year-old marathon runner is healthy by any definition. Currently, a man who lives to ninety has statistically had a long life, though that would change if medical technology suddenly allowed us to live to be two hundred.

As our definition of “health” expands, it does not invalidate earlier definitions, but rather extends them. If medical technology advances to allow ninety-year-olds to win marathons, then our definition of what is healthy for the aged will change – but that does not mean that the twenty-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”.

[[Image:Wingdings.png]]

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 fulfil 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 maths 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:
#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.<ref>Rational consistency, or internal logic.</ref>
#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.<ref>Empirical evidence, or empiricism.</ref>

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 minus fifty 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 rail-roading 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:
#Internal consistency (logic).
#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 two plus two equals five, since “five” is just another way of describing two plus three, not two plus two, and so to say that two plus two equals five is to say that five equals four, 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 Two, 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 rigour 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 categorised 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.<ref>It will be useful to keep this particular premise in mind, since it will be very important later on.</ref>

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.<ref>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.</ref>

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 fifteenth and sixteenth 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 theorise 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.<ref>In physics, the question is: either universal physical rules are valid, or they are not.</ref>

A rule can be valid if it exists empirically, like gravity, or because it is true, like the equation two plus two equals four.

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:
#Universal
#Logical
#Empirically verifiable
#Reproducible
#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 Proofs ===
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:
#The proposition is: the concept “universally preferable behaviour” must be valid.
#Arguing against the validity of universally preferable behaviour demonstrates universally preferable behaviour.
#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:
#All organisms require universally preferred behaviour to live.
#Man is a living organism.
#Therefore all living men are alive due to the practice of universally preferred behaviour.
#Therefore any argument against universally preferable behaviour requires an acceptance and practice of universally preferred behaviour.
#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:
#For a scientific theory to be valid, it must be supported by empirical observation.
#If the concept of “universally preferable behaviour” is valid, then mankind should believe in universally preferable behaviour.
#All men believe in universally preferable behaviour.
#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:
#Choices are almost infinite.
#Most human beings make very similar choices.
#Therefore not all choices can be equal.
#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:
#Organisms succeed by acting upon universally preferable behaviour.
#Man is the most successful organism.
#Therefore man must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
#Man’s mind is his most distinctive organ.
#Therefore man’s mind must have acted most successfully on the basis of universally preferable behaviour.
#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 organising 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 one hundred eighty-six thousand kilometres per second, five kilometres 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 Two.

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 practised. 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.<ref>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 Two of this book.</ref>

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.<ref>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 Two.</ref>

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:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
!
!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.<ref>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.</ref>

=== 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 one hundred dollars and then walk away, I cannot justly come up to you in a year and say that you now owe me one hundred dollars, 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 judgements 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 colour 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 recognise 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 five thousand kilometres 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 organised 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 six o’clock 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 judgements 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 under way, 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 minimise 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 “victimisation” 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 ==

=== The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) ===

== Lifeboat Scenarios ==

=== Grey Areas ===

=== Shades Of Grey ===

=== Universality And Exceptions ===

=== The Purpose And The Dangers ===

== The Beast ==

=== Propaganda ===

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

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Created by Anarchei for use in Universally Preferable Behaviour.

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Anarchei: Introduction

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Introduction
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/1|Forward]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/3|Part One: Theory]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

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 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 civilisation, 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 defence 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 proselytisers. The lie that followed was: “Yahweh is not a pagan superstition, but a real and living God.”

We can personalise 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 eighteenth 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 eighteenth 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, post-modernism 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 tyrannised 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 ten percent 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” two thousand five hundred 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 defence 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 world-views 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.

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour/1

2010-11-30T12:34:39Z

Anarchei: Forward

{{header
| title = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2007
| section = Forward
| previous = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour|Article]]
| next = [[Universally Preferable Behaviour/2|Introduction]]
| notes =
}}

In many fairy tales, there lives a terrible beast of stupendous power, a dragon or a basilisk, which tyrannises 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 nineteenth century Germany. These extreme relativists reserve their most vitriolic attacks for anyone who claims any form of certainty. This post-modern 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 home world 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.<ref>Most of these will be discussed in more detail throughout the course of this book.</ref>
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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 shoot-out than a sober implementation of ethical ideals.
#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.
#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.
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.
#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 counter-intuitive.

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.<ref>Of course, if I have failed, I have at least failed spectacularly, which itself can be both edifying and entertaining!</ref>

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 recognised 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 fifteenth 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 judgement 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.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Stefan Molyneux

2010-11-30T12:24:38Z

Anarchei: /* Books */ Shortened titles of books, full titles will be on pages

[[Image:Molyneux.png|thumb]]'''Stefan Molyneux''' (born 24 September 1966) is a Canadian philosopher, blogger, essayist, author, and host of the Freedomain Radio<ref>[http://www.freedomainradio.com Freedomain Radio] accessed January 7, 2009</ref> series of podcasts, living in Mississauga, Canada. He has written numerous articles and smaller essays which have been published on libertarian websites such as [[LewRockwell.com]], [[antiwar.com]] and [[Strike The Root]]<ref>[http://www.strike-the-root.com/user/195 Columns by Stefan Molyneux] accessed October 25, 2010</ref>, recorded over 1700 podcasts, produced over 500 videos, and written numerous books which are all self-published except for his first, which was published by Publish America. In 2006 Stefan Molyneux quit his previous job in the field of computer software and works full-time on Freedomain Radio, a philosophical community website which is funded through voluntary donations.

==Freedomain Radio==
=== Format ===
Freedomain Radio is primarily an online podcast, however Molyneux also uses essays, videos, books, articles, interviews, and public speaking to deliver his content. The regular content of the show covers topics such as [[anarchism]], [[ethics]], [[Austrian economics]], [[atheism]], [[religion]], [[education]], [[family]], and [[politics]]. Each Sunday Molyneux conducts a call-in show where listeners can talk with him about either a set topic of discussion, or their own. Freedomain Radio also has an online community message board for listeners to discuss Molyneux's content as well as related topics.

=== Books ===
Stefan Molyneux is the author of several non-fiction books. He has written ''[[On Truth]]'', ''[[Universally Preferable Behaviour]]'', ''[[Real-Time Relationships]]'', ''[[Everyday Anarchy]]'', ''[[Practical Anarchy]]'', ''[[Achieving Freedom]]''<ref>Only Part 1 has been released.</ref>, and ''[[Against The Gods?]]''. Molyneux has also written two fictional books, ''The God of Atheists'' and ''Revolutions''.

=== Interviews ===
Stefan Molyneux has conducted interviews with people such as [[Nathaniel Branden]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTg4B_zCj5Q Interview with Nathaniel Branden] accessed October 26, 2010</ref>, [[Max Keiser]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKyutB3u2bM 'On the Edge' with Max Keiser] accessed October 26, 2010</ref><ref>[http://maxkeiser.com/2010/08/16/ote68-on-the-edge-with-stefan-molyneux/ OTE68 On the Edge with Stefan Molyneux]</ref>, [[Peter Schiff]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElzNM5-LxyU The Peter Schiff Interview]</ref>, [[Stephan Kinsella]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3AuTrCq5ws Stephan Kinsella on Intellectual Property] accessed October 26, 2010</ref><ref>[http://www.stephankinsella.com/2010/03/21/kinsella-intellectual-property-discussion-on-freedomain-radio-book-club/ Kinsella Intellectual Property discussion on Freedomain Radio Book Club] accessed October 29, 2010</ref>, [[Mary Ruwart]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Crxm4deDM US Health Care in Crisis] accessed October 26, 2010</ref>, [[Alison Gopnik]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TveUtpRQzXM The Philosophical Baby] accessed October 26, 2010</ref>, [[Marc Faber]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzazGIUV8qw The Economics of the Coming Crash] accessed October 26, 2010</ref>, [[David Lindorff]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gskxFTd1xvA Obama's War Crimes - An Interview with David Lindorff about Omar Khadr] accessed October 27, 2010</ref>, [[Greg J. Siegle]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjqrNPomIzg Anxiety, Depression, Autism] accessed October 26, 2010</ref>, [[Stuart Shankar]]<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bi6x-4aNmM Babies, Brains, Nature, and Nurture] accessed October 26, 2010</ref>, and several other figures in the fields of education, academia, psychology, politics, and economics.

=== Public Speaking ===
Stefan Molyneux was the closing speaker for the 2009 [[New Hampshire Liberty Forum]] on March 8.<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0DFA802C66A4597E New Hampshire Liberty Forum - Keynote Speaker: Stefan Molyneux] accessed October 25, 2010</ref><ref>[http://freestateproject.org/events/libertyforum/2009 2009 Liberty Forum] accessed October 29, 2010</ref> The position was taken by [[Ron Paul]] in 2008 and [[John Stossel]] in 2007. Molyneux debated with 2004 US Presidential Candidate [[Michael Badnarik]] at [[Drexel University]] on July 5, 2009.<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6E26254DBE03EA59 How Much Government Is Necessary?] accessed October 25, 2010</ref><ref>[http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=20375 Campaign For Liberty Newsletter 6/20/09] accessed October 25, 2010</ref> Molyneux was the opening speaker for PorcFest 2010 on June 24<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmSjAupRe80 2010 Porcupine Freedom Festival - Opening Speaker - Stefan Molyneux, Freedomain Radio] accessed October 25, 2010</ref><ref>[http://freestateproject.org/festival/ PorcFest] accessed October 25, 2010</ref>, the annual liberty festival organized by the [[Free State Project]]. Molyneux spoke at the [[Students For Liberty]] Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference hosted at [[Drexel University]] on October 9, 2010.<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujBx5dkI1ZI&hd=1 Freedom is Humility - Stefan Molyneux speaking at Drexel University] accessed October 25, 2010</ref><ref>[http://politicalconferences.org/2009/10/philadelphia-conference/ 2010 Students For Liberty Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference] accessed October 25, 2010</ref><ref>[http://studentsforliberty.org/blog/freedom-is-humility-stefan-molyneux’s-opening-keynote-at-the-mid-atlantic-regional-conference/ Freedom is Humility: Stefan Molyneux’s Opening Keynote at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference] accessed November 7, 2010.</ref> Molyneux spoke at Libertopia<ref name="libertopia">[http://www.libertopia.org/home/ Libertopia] accessed October 25, 2010</ref> on October 14–15, 2010. Molyneux spoke at the [[Ontario Libertarian Party]] Annual Liberty Seminar at [[Toronto]] on November 6, 2010.<ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zmKsaA6jA The Power of the Parasite Class - Stefan Molyneux Speaks in Toronto] accessed November 9, 2010.</ref><ref>[http://www.libertarian.on.ca/AGM/AGM_2010.htm 2010 Annual Liberty Seminar and General Meeting] accessed November 9, 2010.</ref>

== Notes ==
{{Reflist|2}}

==External links==
*[http://freedomainradio.com/ Freedomain Radio] official website
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux Stefan Molyneux] on [[Wikipedia]]
*[http://www.facebook.com/stefan.molyneux Stefan Molyneux] on [[Facebook]]
*[http://twitter.com/freedomainradio Stefan Molyneux] on [[Twitter]]
*[http://www.youtube.com/freedomainradio Freedomain Radio] channel on [[YouTube]]

{{Wikipedia text}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Molyneux, Stefan}}
[[Category:Anarcho-capitalists]]
[[Category:Philosophers]]

Book:Universally Preferable Behaviour

2010-11-30T12:22:47Z

Anarchei: Created page

Book:Practical Anarchy

2010-11-30T08:49:12Z

Anarchei: Added more detailed summary

Book:Achieving Freedom

2010-11-30T08:39:17Z

Anarchei: Added more detailed summary

'''''Achieving Freedom''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]]. It was preceded by ''[[Everyday Anarchy]]'' and ''[[Practical Anarchy]]''. Only the first part of the book has been released so far. In the part of the book that has been released, Molyneux challenges the view that academia, religion, and politics will lead to a reduction in the size of government. The book offers arguments and evidence that supports this criticism. The book also examines why people are resistant to the philosophy of liberty. Molyneux has written the next part of the book and is expected to release it some time in the near future. This part of the book will deal with the actual process of achieving freedom.

== Contents ==
*[[Achieving Freedom/1|How (Not) To Achieve Freedom]]
*[[Achieving Freedom/2|Root Causes]]

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/HNTAFPDF Digital version]
*[http://fdrurl.com/HNTAF Audio version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:25:42Z

Anarchei: /* We Can Only Hope We Are Screwing Up */

{{header
| title = [[Achieving Freedom]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2008
| section = Root Causes
| previous = [[Achieving Freedom/1|How (Not) To Achieve Freedom]]
| next =
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== The Effects Of Ethics ==
A deep understanding of the non-aggression principle (NAP) creates a significant moral divide, with those who initiate the use of force on one side, and those who reject the initiation of the use of force on the other.<ref>For more on this, please have a look at my book on Universally Preferable Behaviour, available for free on my website.</ref>

Those who initiate the use of force can rationally be called evil, while those who actively support the initiation of the use of force – who justify it morally – can be called corrupt.

It is also reasonable to accept that someone cannot be responsible for knowledge they do not yet possess. We can easily understand that while a modern doctor who does not prescribe antibiotics for a virulent infection is grossly negligent, a medieval doctor who had no access to antibiotics cannot be held to the same standard.

Between these two extremes lies a kind of “grey area.” When antibiotics were first being introduced and tested, it would have been irresponsible for a doctor to prescribe them for every conceivable ailment (as remains the case today) – however, after a certain amount of testing and verification had been completed, the balance tipped towards prescription.

Someone who has never heard the argument that taxation is force cannot be morally condemned for their ignorance. A baby is not “uneducated” – rather they are in a state of “pre-education.” I do not know Mandarin – this does not make me a fool, or ignorant in general, but rather it is merely the case that I lack the knowledge to speak Mandarin.

The same is true in terms of moral knowledge. I only came to a deep understanding and a consistent theoretical application of the NAP in my philosophy in my thirties – close to twenty years after I began to study philosophy. This does not mean that I was morally corrupt or evil in my twenties, but rather that I was in the pursuit of knowledge that I had not attained as yet. I did not have exposure to some of the more consistent moral arguments in favour of a stateless society, although I must confess that I did on occasion feel a certain amount of unease with the Objectivist approach to certain issues, particularly in terms of ethics.

It was through an acceptance of this unease that I began to develop more original approaches to the issues I found lacking in other philosophies. I certainly make no claim to originality in all these areas, all that I can say for sure is that these ideas were new to me, whether they were new to the world is not something I can really speak to, since I prefer the generation of new ideas to the comparison of those ideas with every other school of thought.

Someone cannot be considered immoral for failing to understand that taxation is force – the crux of the issue arises when they are first exposed to the argument that taxation is force.

This argument is emotionally trying. The fundamental alienation that spreads in the soul of a person who begins to understand that taxation is force is hard to bear.

When a powerful and foundational moral argument is introduced to a person in adulthood, the emotional recoil that they experience is really based upon what has been missing from the moral discourse of their society.

=== The Libertarian Division ===
Libertarians of all kinds are constantly making the basic moral argument that taxation is force, and that the government is a violent institution. As moral theories go, that this is not exactly quantum physics. Problems such as abortion, “lifeboat scenarios,” homesteading, capital punishment, and so on are all highly challenging and controversial – the fact that we pay taxes because we are threatened with jail is not.

Why, then, is this basic fact still so endlessly denied, evaded, fogged, and rejected within society?

One of the central problems with pursuing an illusory solution to a genuine challenge – religion, academia, political action – is that it avoids the necessity of elemental self-criticism.

In the business world, this process is called a post mortem, or a strict and stringent review of even a successful project, to create a list of “lessons learned,” and so pursue a program of continuous improvement. Unsuccessful projects are analysed in great detail, and improved practices are put into place to help avoid such catastrophes in the future.

Coming from the business entrepreneurial world, it is truly shocking to me to see the degree to which libertarians avoid performing any kind of post mortems on their projects. The same is true of academics and priests, of course.

The most astounding statements are made with no empirical evidence whatsoever – “Ron Paul can win!” “Educating the public will bring about political freedom!” “Religious beliefs are an essential component of human liberty!”

Even statements made in private, to me personally, are wild assertions – again, with no empirical evidence or reasoning whatsoever. I have been told that libertarians dare not speak about their atheism openly, for fear of alienating Christian supporters – on the assumption that such an alienation would be disastrous for the freedom movement. But how is this known for sure? What logical reasoning or empirical evidence is brought to bear on this assumption?

When I was a young man, I attended the National Theatre School in Montreal, Canada for two years, studying playwriting and acting. I had the juicy role of Cornwall in King Lear, and I vividly remember one rehearsal where we evil characters got news of a disaster. As dedicated method actors, we all turned our attention inwards, and thought about dead kittens and sad films. The director stared at us with shock, horror, and anger. “How the hell am I supposed to know that you have just received the worst news of your lives?”

I tried to explain to him – and how earnest I was – that if I change my inward thinking, it will communicate itself to the audience in some magical and unconscious manner.

His lip curled in scorn, and he asked, “So let us say that I have paid twenty dollars to come and see this play, and I am in row two hundred in the theatre, how is it that I’m supposed to psychically commune with you to understand that your slightly drooping mouth indicates some sort of inner horror?”

All of us actors resisted this crass and coarse showmanship, preferring to imagine that some movie camera was virtually up our noses, and could catch the slightest change in our facial expressions. The next time we rehearsed the scene, again, we went inwards and summoned up visions of bad news in our distant histories. The director leapt up, grabbed the chair that he was sitting on, and threw it across the stage.

He whirled to us, and said: “Do any of you not understand that I am pissed off right now? If you were in row two hundred, would you still be able to somehow figure out that I am pissed off? I don’t care if you do cartwheels or start juggling, just do something when you hear, as these characters, the worst news of your entire fucking lives!”

Strangely enough, this advice followed me very productively into the business world. Whenever a disaster occurred – and troubles come not as single spies, but in battalions, in the entrepreneurial world – I would sometimes hear in my ear this director’s commandment that when something bad occurs, the important thing is to do something – in a way, it does not even really matter what, because anything is better than standing and staring.
I suppose that I have brought some of this energy to the libertarian world, and constantly feel surprised – which itself is telling – that an intensely pro-business movement so studiously avoids criticism and the exploration of alternatives in the face of disaster.

It took me quite some time to really begin to understand what is going on in the world of libertarianism that inevitably produces this avoidance. I resisted for quite a long time the inevitable conclusions – the analysis that I talk about in this book – but then I basically thought:

“Okay, let us say that I the Chief Operating Officer at a big company, and I have a division called Libertarianism. This division has been making claims for decades about its ability to increase the size of its market share, to the point where it actually has a dominant majority in the market. However, when I look at the actual performance results of this division, I see that the market – government power – has actually gotten massively larger, while the market share – libertarian votes – has actually shrunk to near insignificance, relative to government power.
“This Libertarian division has been sort of a pet project of a doddering CEO (his name is Christian, of course) for quite some time, and it has not been subjected to any of the rigours and disciplines of the free market, because it has received funding from Christian regardless of whether it even remotely achieves its goals. As the COO, I cannot overturn the decisions of the CEO.

“This Division is full of very, very smart people, with doctorates and masters, all sorts of connections and amazing writing abilities, and rich experience in marketing and advertising – so it is not a lack of intelligence or ability that has made this Division so wildly disastrous. This division is full of people who keep talking about how a lack of market discipline and consequences for one’s actions, end up creating lazy and inefficient organisations – so they even have the theoretical understanding of what has caused their own current state.

“Furthermore, this Division has ended up telling our CEO – Christian – whatever he wants to hear, because he is the source of their funding, not the market that they claim they are trying to take over.”

If I were a business executive faced with this problem, it is not too hard to figure out the best course of action.

First of all, I would do whatever I could to stop Christian from funding this Division, because if he continues to fund it, all of the energy and talents of these brilliant people will be entirely wasted, because people respond to incentives, and he who pays the piper calls the tune, and it is essential to turn the attentions of these employees to the actual market, rather than this doddering executive.

Secondly, I would continually remind the people in this Division that they had not in fact achieved any of the goals that they had set for themselves – or, if they had achieved them, there was no way of knowing, because nothing was being tested, measured, reported on, and there were no post mortems whatsoever for any of the failed projects.

As long as Christian kept funding this Libertarian Division, I would be fully aware that the likelihood of instilling any responsibility for the actual achievement of goals, and creating any initiative or desire to change tactics or existing approaches, would be impossible. There would be no point attempting to hire people with greater discipline and focus to join this group, because such people would simply be ignored, scorned, and protected from their own failures. This Libertarian Division, like everyone else, knows exactly on which side its bread is buttered.

I would spend some time trying to get this Libertarian Division to stop taking funding from Christian, by writing about how bad Christian’s business judgement was, and how his money was creating an environment of laziness, pontificating, self-congratulation – and utter futility.
Of course, since I am a rational and empirical businessman, I would not beat my head against this wall for too long. After a certain amount of time, if no progress was being made, and if the heads of this Division simply stopped responding to my emails and phone calls, then I would take another approach – you could call it writing a book, if you like.

I could scarcely criticise the heads of this Libertarian Division for failing to be self-critical and empirical, and continue to beat my head against the walls of their indifference and hostility. I would put my criticisms out there, and see what response came back – if those criticisms were ignored, and I were personally attacked repeatedly by employees of this Libertarian Division, then of course I would accept that reality is what it is, and take another course.

Since I was unable to stop Christian’s funding, and since I was unable to get the leaders of the Libertarian Division to review their failures and alter their course of action, I would take the next step in attempting to rescue the goal that we all supposedly share.

I would appeal to the greed of those who wish to spend their lives in pursuit of something which can be achieved, and who wish to add to the practical and achievable virtue in the world, and who wish to begin laying the foundations for a human liberty which can in fact be won.

If a friend who is eager for an enjoyable, productive, and positive work environment tells you that they want to join the post office, what would you tell them?

Surely, you would tell him that joining the post office is a terrible decision, because forty percent of post office employees are ex-military, a stifling and soul crushing union controls everything, there is no free market discipline or opportunity, and everything is politics, abuse, futility, and annoyance.

It is not likely that you will be able to talk people out of being postal workers if they are only a few years from retirement, or are heavily invested in their careers, or who actually do not want to have anything to do with the free market, but rather want to sit around on their unionised asses, eating doughnuts, and bitching about their supervisors.

Thus, to deal with this Libertarian Division, I would focus my efforts not on cutting off Christian’s funding, which is impossible, or on trying to talk long-time division employees out of ditching their over-funded privileges – but rather, the best thing that I could do for the company as a whole would be to try to prevent as many people as possible from acting under the delusion that joining the Libertarian Division would bring them any real happiness, or efficacy, or the contentment and self-esteem that comes from tangible achievement.

I would do my best to communicate to those who were looking to achieve something great with their lives that the last place they should ever go is the Libertarian Division. It is true that this Division continually talks about its grand plans, massive schemes, inevitable successes, and wonderful achievements, but I would continually point out the fact that these only exist in the fantasies of those trapped in the Division. I would continually point out the true facts of the matter, which are that the division constantly wastes money, wastes time, fails to achieve its goals, sits idly by and refuses to reform its approach despite the fact that it is eternally losing ground, gets carpal tunnel syndrome from continually patting itself on the back and publishing self congratulatory articles about its wonderful “achievements,” makes wild statements of both intent and achievement while either ignoring or viciously attacking anyone who dares to point out the basic fact that less than nothing has actually been achieved, and that making up achievements is a pitiful and delusional substitute for actually achieving something in the real world.

You cannot get people to quit the post office who are already there, but you can at least do your best to help people avoid the mistake of joining it.

That, really, is my goal in this book. I may not be able to convince you that the approach I suggest is the best one – and it may not be, for all I know. Like my director said twenty years ago, we have to do something, rather than nothing – and the first step to doing something is to recognise that we are in fact doing less than nothing.

To continue the above analogy, I may not be able to get you to become a self-starting entrepreneur, but if I can at least get you to not join the post office, I have certainly done something worthwhile.

Perhaps in the future people will look back upon the proposals in this book and call them foolish, mad, delusional, ridiculous – and that is completely fine by me! Perhaps all that will come out of this book is the understanding that what we are doing is not working, and that we need to begin to creatively assault the basic problem. I may not be able to prove that the world is round, but if all that I do is convince people that the world is not flat, at least we can begin exploring the alternatives.

== The Presence Of Absence ==
When you tell someone that taxation is coercion, what is their response? Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, they will not deal with the simple fact that their government is a prison built upon a foundation of force.

Unfortunately, due to the three false approaches described above, libertarianism as a movement has never really tried to deal with the basic fact that its most simple argument is almost universally rejected.

When we compare the taxation equals force argument (TEF) to the theory of evolution, it comes up woefully short in terms of general acceptance.
Fundamentally, the only reason that someone rejects the theory of evolution is because they are superstitious, and believes that God blew some dust and made a man in His own image, and that we are descended from that man – surprisingly enough, given that we have belly buttons, and we can assume that God does not, unless we need to start searching for His ancestry as well.

Resistance to the theory of evolution is clearly centred around religious bigotry – what have libertarians done over the past few hundred years to identify the source of the near universal rejection of the TEF?

You would think that this would be job one – there is no more important resistance to overcome for libertarians than the opposition to the TEF. If we cannot convince people that the government is force, the entire libertarian position becomes woefully incomprehensible – a random grab-bag of dislike of authority, hatred of outsiders, religious addiction, some crazed desire to return to a mythological past where the Founding Fathers could walk on water – the whole philosophy becomes little more than a nutty fringe element of incomprehensible resistance to – what? Without an understanding of the TEF argument, what on earth are libertarians obsessed with? What is the point?

The basic fact that the libertarian movement has never seriously attempted to answer the question – why do people reject the fact that taxation equals force? – is something that is almost incomprehensible, as long as we imagine that libertarianism is about getting people to accept TEF, which it is not – it is all about getting funding from Christians, and jobs for free-market academics.

If we wish to gain any kind of real traction in society – if we do not want to end up wasting our lives spinning our wheels, then we do in fact have to answer that most basic question: why are our simple arguments so universally rejected?

There comes a time in every person's life when they have to stop blaming other people.

There comes a time in any movement’s life where it has to stop blaming external circumstances.

It is hard to find where in the libertarian movement this most basic question is even asked, let alone answered. When I have brought it up, in various environments, I have gotten the most mealy-mouthed platitudes in return, such as, “Well, change takes time,” or, “People are dumb,” or, “It’s really not that easy a concept to understand,” and so on.

Again and again, in libertarianism, we see these blind assertions of arbitrary “facts” – without any evidence or reasoning whatsoever.

Naturally, this is associated with the exact same Christian habit, such as, when asking where the world came from, “God made it!”

== Why People Reject The TEF Argument ==
As I said above, and as I have argued in more emotional terms in my novel The God of Atheists, the corruptions of the present can all be traced back to the initial decisions of the past.

The decision to ally itself with Christianity turned libertarianism from a social science into a mere mascot for religious bigotry. If libertarians had remained true to the methodology of their discipline, they would have scornfully rejected the financial bait of superstition. Every movement has its price, to be sure, but I do believe that a movement dedicated to rationality, liberty, and independence from arbitrary authority should have held out for more than a few thousand dollars and a bag of musty Bibles.

Once the decision was made to join forces with superstition, a key element became immediately scrubbed from the intellectual arsenal of libertarianism.

=== Psychology ===
If you do not understand at least some of the basic tenets of psychology, you will be largely unable to break repetitive and pointless patterns.
Psychology is based upon the principle that there are unconscious and opposing forces or personas within the mind. When we look at the body, we can understand the purpose of each of the organs, given enough time and research, and there is nothing hidden within the body that prevents it from achieving its goals – or, if there is, we call it a visible disease, that we can see and hopefully treat.

In the mind, though, there is a kind of invisible cancer called avoidance, wherein thoughts which cause anxiety, fear, anger, or other kinds of emotional distress can be repressed or ignored.

There is a lot that is controversial about psychology, but three basic principles remain incontrovertible:
#Early childhood experiences have an enormous impact on personality and brain development.
#Significant aspects of the mind remain unavailable to our conscious ego (the unconscious).
#Constantly avoiding or repressing your own thoughts and feelings results in bad mental health.

The relationship between repression and anxiety is very well documented, and the most basic defence against anxiety is dissociation.

Another well documented and well understood psychological phenomenon is that of projection, which is the habit of ascribing our own negative qualities to other people or things. One common example of this which most of us who have debated over the Internet are well aware of is the phenomenon of a man coming into a debate with highly provocative or insulting opinions, who then accuses everyone else of being mysteriously “aggressive.” Similarly, people who have an abusive “inner critic” will often project their experience of endless self-attacks into some external form, such as imagining that various people are out to get them, or obsessing over government regulations or currency manipulations, and so on.

If I were a therapist, and libertarianism were a patient of mine, the first question I would ask, as it lounged on my couch, is why it sees corruption everywhere it looks.

After a certain amount of psychological exploration, we would doubtless discover – as is almost always the case – that the corruption that libertarianism sees everywhere in the world (except itself!) is actually rooted in its own hypocritical decisions. This would actually explain why libertarianism fundamentally does not actually want to eliminate corruption in the world beyond, because that would be psychologically disastrous to most of those involved in the movement.

If we lose the ability to project our negative traits onto some other person or entity, we actually experience the anxiety, fear, and rage within ourselves.

When libertarians decided to take Christian cash, they automatically and unconsciously decided that theirs was a movement that was going to be entirely hostile towards psychology and any depth of self-knowledge.

The reason for this is that all religion is profoundly anti-psychological in nature. The simple reason for this is that God himself is such a primal projection of human nature – fears, desires, and self-importance – that in order to preserve the fantasy that God exists somewhere “out there,” religion has to virulently and endlessly oppose the exploration of the self and an understanding of psychology.

One of the main components of achieving deep self-knowledge is the differentiation between “self” and “other.” This sounds ridiculously simple, but it is actually quite complex. I can only really touch on the surface of this journey, but to give a simple example, when we look at a sports fan painting themselves in silly colours and madly cheering some team, we can easily see that such a person clearly has invested their ego, happiness, and fears, into the uncontrollable actions of others. This is an example of confusing the world, and the people in it, for yourself.
Similarly, when someone gets all choked up and dewy-eyed when a flag is raised, or a song is played, then clearly they are mistaking their own personality and values for some external symbol such as a piece of cloth or some notes of music.

It is really impossible to genuinely know yourself if you keep confusing yourself for people in costume, or people playing a sport, or pieces of cloth, or strains of music, or a race, or a language, or a geography – or an imaginary God.

Self-knowledge requires a strong and clear differentiation between who you are, and what everything else is. You cannot accurately identify a cow if you keep thinking that a cow is a “country,” or a “noble soldier,” or “loyalty,” or your “hope for victory,” or a “Jewish zombie who flew up to heaven and eternally judges your brain.”

The growth of psychological and emotional maturity is the slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is.

Again, this sounds ridiculously easy, but it is very often blindingly difficult. Most people wander around the world with highly reflective sunglasses on – but pointing the wrong way – so that they are only seeing a distorted reflection of themselves, rather than the world itself.
Religion is the most primal projection mechanism of all. We are alive, we possess rational consciousness; the universe is not alive, and does not possess rational consciousness. We are born, the universe is not. We worry about our virtue, the universe does not. We bring truth into the universe, the universe does not bring truth to us.<ref>For more information on this, you might be interested in my video/audio series “An Introduction to Philosophy,” available on my website at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/videos.html</ref> The degree to which religion facilitates the projection of anthropomorphic characteristics into a dead and empty universe is truly staggering when you begin to really see it.

The pursuit of self-knowledge is in many ways the end of religion. By aligning itself with the primitive superstition of psychological projection, libertarianism entirely walled off its access to one of the greatest insights of modernity, which is the discovery and exploration of the unconscious.

It is in the unconscious that we find the answer as to why people consistently reject the simple and obvious argument that taxation equals force.

The unconscious is an enormous aspect of the mind that processes empirical information with staggering rapidity, and provides value-based responses in the form of emotional reactions.

The causal chain of processing that occurs in the unconscious is unavailable to the conscious mind without a great deal of introspection and self-knowledge. What cognitive psychologists call “core beliefs” only occur to us consciously as feelings. Feelings do result from cognitive associations – a species of logical reasoning, so to speak – but those associations are not easily available to the conscious mind.

We fully understand that if we stick our hand into a fire, a lack of knowledge of neurobiology will not prevent us from experiencing pain. In the same way, a lack of conscious understanding of our core beliefs will not prevent us from reacting emotionally to those beliefs.

In fact, the less we consciously understand our deepest thoughts and feelings, the more those thoughts and feelings have “the ring of truth,” so to speak.

For instance, if we do not understand that patriotism is a collective delusion – the theft of the pride of virtue through the accident of geography – then the warm glow that we feel in the presence of patriotism remains unquestioned for us. As a consequence, when we are evaluating information related to our country, our unconscious tendency will be to automatically accept that which is most favourable to our delusional emotional state, and reject with hostility that which punctures the vanity of our fantasy attachment.

However, once we realise that our attachment to a mere concept (“America!”) is empirically invalid and emotionally hollow, we can begin to deal with our emotions as they really are, with regards to ourselves, and our own personal history, and we can begin to uncover our core beliefs, which are generally formed very early in life, up to the age of five or so, as a result of our early childhood experiences.

Such a process, of course, scarcely benefits those who profit from patriotism.

In the same way, once we understand that there is no God, we go through the natural disorientation and emotional emptiness that our former hysterical “worship” was designed to cover up. In a very real way, this is the inevitable withdrawal that comes when you stop taking a mind-altering drug.

All of the thoughts and emotions that formerly were invested in the fantasy projection of a god now collapse back into the personality, and can be dealt with as self-generated phenomena – not stimulated by some external deity, but created in the personality through personal history and prior decisions.

This is the process known to Jungian psychologists as individuation, or the recognition that all internal emotional states are generated by internal phenomena – not by externalities like stained glass, near-naked bleeding weeping gods, bits of stained cloth, or strains of music.
The incredible value that results from the difficult process of individuation is an understanding and mastery of one’s own internal state. No longer are you like the hysterical sports fan whose happiness trembles on the spot where a leather ball may – or may not – land. No longer are you like the brain-addled patriot, who takes wild existential pride in the proximity of certain dirt to their mother’s womb. No longer are you the desperate and fearful religious addict, who begs for the favours and fears the punishments of a God that really “lives” deep within their own brain, in their own amygdala and hypothalamus, shouting up from the invisible caves of early childhood.

When you ally yourself with an organisation that profits from keeping people in a state of psychological retardation, which flourishes only by provoking the most dangerous and infantile aspects of human consciousness, and which grows only as the self-knowledge of its members shrinks, you are not building a bridge to the future, but rather voluntarily throwing yourself into a chasm of prehistory.

Libertarians know this – unconsciously, of course – and that is why they worship a time before the rise of psychology – the golden days of the Founding Fathers, stirring writings and noble paintings, when the Constitution was written with fiery words on the tapestry of history, and a new nation was forged out of the blah blah blah...

On a much smaller level, of course, this is why so many libertarians turned against my show – Freedomain Radio – when I and my listeners began to really talk about psychology and self-knowledge.

This is an indication of the astoundingly rapid processing that occurs in the unconscious. The moment that my show began to turn towards early childhood experiences, practical self-knowledge, emotional defences, and the necessity of withdrawing emotional projections from the world, all the former support I had in the libertarian community mysteriously dried up.

Unconsciously, a sequence flashed with enormous rapidity through the minds of most libertarians, which went a little something like this:
*ZOMG!
*Stef is talking about undoing emotional defences and psychological projections!
*Religion is based on emotional defences and psychological projections!
*Libertarianism is based on religion!
*Thus Stef is talking about undoing libertarianism!
*I need a pay cheque!
*ZOMG!

The fundamental reason that libertarians have never asked the basic question – why do people reject the TEF argument? – is that the answer lies in the unconscious, and in deep knowledge of both the self and of other people.

In other words, the answer lies in that which unravels religion.

Since libertarianism relies on religion, and religion survives by opposing psychology, libertarians had no choice but to oppose an increase in psychological understanding.

Because libertarianism is so opposed to psychology, it cannot ask any questions which involve the unconscious. As a result, it is stuck in a blind repetition of earlier mistakes, like anyone who resists self-knowledge. It cannot examine the resistance that society as a whole has towards libertarian arguments, because that resistance is unconscious – and so it has to make up empty-headed stories to explain away its endless failures – thus guaranteeing their repetition.

Psychological, emotional, and intellectual maturity demands that when we do not know the answer to a question, we state with direct honesty: “I do not know.”

This is not an approach that has ever been part of any religion – in fact, religion is a endless cluster of deluded attacks on every reasonable question under the sun!<ref>Which, according to the Old Testament, orbits the Earth.</ref>

This is why no post mortem has ever been performed on a libertarian project – because such a post mortem would reveal an appalling ignorance as to its failure. Since libertarianism is full of enormously intelligent people, it would not take very long for them to begin to figure out why they were so abysmally ignorant – which was that they had been avoiding the question.

Once they figured out that they were avoiding the question, the next question would be: why?

And so, step-by-step, down the magic staircase they would go, to the roots of their own evasions and emotions, their fears and greed, the dark side that is in all of us, and all those other difficult and messy aspects of humanity that scare so many “rational” people.

No, no – much easier to just cash in all those juicy Christian checks and go write another useless article about the Federal Reserve.

== Withdrawing Projection: An Example ==
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has been called the “Rashomon war” – a reference to a Japanese play where everyone has wildly divergent views of a theft in the woods – due to its ever-changing justifications. None of the “factual” claims advanced to support the invasion held up to any reasonable scrutiny, even before the war began.

Those who do not understand or appreciate psychology will forever root around the surface justifications for such genocidal murders, and remain perpetually baffled and disoriented in this ever-shifting hall of mirrors.

If none of the reasons advanced are the real reasons, how can psychology help us?

If we recall the three fundamental psychological axioms – the enormous effects of early childhood experiences, the existence of the unconscious, and the dangers of repression – some possible sources for the drive to war become much clearer.

George Bush reports that he asked God whether or not to invade Iraq. As long as George imagined that he was communing with some vast interstellar intelligence outside his own skull, the “answer” that he received had the ring of an omniscient absolute.

If George knew even a little about psychology, he would understand that he was not in fact praying to God, but rather “submerging” a question into his own unconscious. Psychology fully supports our general experience that our personalities are composed of more than a single “voice,” in that we often debate with ourselves, experience contradictory impulses and ideas, experience nightly dreams that can be utterly at odds with our conscious values, and so on. In fact, it would be impossible to explain the phenomenon of creative writing – with its varied and believable characters, all coming from one mind – without accepting the reality that our personality is a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than a single and unified dictatorship of the ego.

Thus George cannot be praying to God – since God does not exist – but rather he is asking a question of himself.

When the “answer” comes back, if George is at all interested in self-knowledge and the withdrawal of projection, he will understand that it is not God telling him to invade Iraq, but rather it is an expression of his own unconscious desires.

With this understanding, George can then begin to examine why he himself wants to invade Iraq, rather than operate under the delusion that some eternal and omniscient ghost is telling him what to do.

Once George can begin to examine his own motives for invasion, he can begin the journey of self-discovery, where he will end up exploring one of the potential scenarios below – or another one, which remains obscure:
#As a result of being abused as a child by his mother, George has grown up with a deep hatred of his father, who did not protect him. This hatred is utterly unacceptable to him – and so, when Saddam Hussein threatens to kill George’s father, Hussein is actually expressing a repressed murderous wish that lies deep in George’s unconscious. By attacking Hussein, George is actually “attacking” his own desire to kill his father.<ref>In fact, Bush claimed as one of his reasons for invading Iraq the fact that Saddam Hussein “threatened to kill my dad”.</ref>
#George’s political ambitions are driven by deep feelings of personal self-hatred, resulting from his early maternal abuse, alcoholic self-medication, and general feelings of invisibility and worthlessness. Deep down, he truly hates the American public for enabling these hollow ambitions, and so takes out his rage against them by committing them to war.
#George’s antisocial tendencies were early expressed by his childhood habit of blowing up frogs – childhood cruelty towards animals is a clear sign of sadism. These expressions of inner torture were really cries for help, which went unheeded in his family, and in his society. His inner horror continually drives escalations of sadism and violence, with the purpose that someone, somewhere, will understand, and empathise with his psychological agony. Unfortunately, rather than empathise with this pain, the American public rewards him by giving him the power of life and death over millions. Since he has developed a habit of acting out violence as a cry for help, he initiates war as the ultimate expression of his truly apocalyptic self-hatred.
#When George was a child, his mother was all-powerful, and abused him emotionally and physically, scratching him violently and screaming at him. Thus George understood that power is always associated with the abuse of the helpless. Furthermore, George’s mother would veer between affection and abuse. Saddam Hussein was a “friend” of the United States, and then became an “enemy,” just as George did with his own mother when he was a child. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was essentially helpless in the face of US military power, and so George re-enacted the principle “attack the helpless person who was formerly your friend” by invading Iraq.
#Due to the mechanism of projection, George was able to project his own sadism onto Saddam Hussein – which meant that he experienced Saddam Hussein as extremely dangerous. His own increasing murderous rage – which would in fact trigger a war – was projected onto the Iraqi dictator, and so George genuinely felt that Saddam was “about to attack” him – when of course the complete opposite was true.
#The murderous rage that George experienced from his parents was re-enacted against the Iraqi children, half a million of whom died as a result of the US and UK led sanctions against Iraq – started by George’s own father after the Gulf War. Once George continued his father’s role of “destroyer of children,” he could no longer escape the role of “parental abuser,” but could only escalate the murderous destruction of others.

None of the above explanations may be valid, of course – the purpose is merely to highlight the self-knowledge that can be attained when we look inwards, into the myths that have created us, and that we have created – rather than stare into the empty heavens and dream of conversations with dead constellations.

== Why People Resist Libertarianism ==
Once we understand the amazing power of the unconscious, its uncanny ability to process enormous amounts of information virtually instantaneously, we can begin to unravel the mystery of why people reject libertarianism.

=== Resistance To Truth ===
Prior to the seventeenth century, all human societies – without exception – were founded on abuse, violence, brutality, and a strict and vicious hierarchy.<ref>For more on this, please visit http://www.psychohistory.com</ref> What fundamentally sustained this hierarchy were lies about the nature of power. Mere men were given the label “King,” and called divine, or divinely sanctioned. Other men, wearing what often appeared to be tea-cosies on their heads, were considered to be in direct and constant communication with divine beings, and so their word was the law of the gods.

The average man and woman saw things very differently indeed, deep in their heart of hearts. We can only imagine how many times throughout history men looked at a fat fool in a gold crown and knew that he was a mortal man, just like them, except worse. We cannot know how many peasants kneeled before a sneering priest, squinting up through their lowered lashes, seeing the snot in his nose, and knowing in their soul that he was just a smug and pompous version of their own selves.

In the old story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” two tailors arrive at a kingdom and promised to make the King a spectacular suit, using a thread with the magical ability to remain invisible to anyone who was not worthy of his position. They began pretending to make the suit, using no thread or cloth at all, but only miming their work. Whenever the king “wears” the work in progress, his courtiers and ministers all express amazement at the beauty of the suit, because they do not want to be revealed as people who are not worthy of their positions.
Eventually, the King is carried in a procession through the town, where everyone cries in wonder at the beauty of the suit they cannot see, until one child stands up, points at the King, and asks in a loud voice why the king is naked.

This, in my opinion, is the best fairy tale ever. I really could care less about knights and dragons, but the truth that is contained in this story could fill a book shelf.

Embedded in this tale of course is the general fear that people have about speaking the truth, even when it is perfectly obvious – but what is even more delightful, and terrifying, about this story is the complete absence of violence.

Everyone says that they can see the suit that is not there because of their own insecurities, their fear that they are not fit for their positions – but what society in history has ever been able to maintain a predatory hierarchy such as an aristocracy without the use of violence? For heaven’s sake, we cannot even maintain a parliamentary democracy without threatening everyone with a gun if they do not turn over half their income!

Openly identifying the violence at the root of mythological power was always and forever sheer suicide, throughout our entire evolutionary development as a species. Learning not to see what was blatantly obvious was foundational to surviving as an individual.

The amazing thing about the fairy tale above is that it describes how afraid people are to speak truth to power – and yet it itself re- mains afraid to speak truth to power, because it blames the fear of the people on the internal state of insecurity rather than the external threats of torture and beheading. It also shows the insecurity as radiating outward from the King – in other words, the people are insecure because the King is insecure. It is certainly true that no King can rationally feel that he deserves his position, but it is certainly not true that people were insecure because Kings were anxious and insecure, but rather because their Kings were sadistic and genocidal.

=== The Rational Fear Of Truth ===
Many of our desires and fears are hard-wired into our brains, down deep in the neurological cortex of our minds. Our sexual desires, our fight and flight mechanisms, our desire for water when we are thirsty, food when we are hungry, and rest when we are tired – this constellation of passions, needs, and emotions are not learned, but rather innate – babies do not learn to cry when they are hungry, but are born with that ability, as countless red-eyed parents can attest.

We have a natural aversion to that which is highly likely to bring about danger. Natural selection has done a wonderful job of picking those out of the gene pool who do things that get them killed.

The brutal power structures that dominated almost all of human history used endless violence to maintain their rule, but always had to at least provide the appearance that the violence was caused by the immorality – the “disobedience” – of the ruled. Throughout history, mock trials have been the norm, which drape the veneer of justice over what is, essentially, a Mafia hit.

The lies required to sustain the illusion that murder is virtue are virtually without number. The obvious irrationality of the rulers are recast as the “rationality” of gods. The obvious hypocritical double standards of power are “justified” according to the divine right of kings. Any citizens who attempt to break the chains that bind them are slaughtered wholesale, and then labelled “dangerous” to the other citizens – a mind-bending reversal of what is actually true! Societies wracked by dictatorships, wars, plagues, and famines are called “ordered,” while even the thought of a voluntary society not run by genocidal criminals is called “chaotic” and “anarchic.”

Since the dawn of our species, people have been endlessly slaughtered for speaking the simple truth about the violence of those in power. In addition, anyone who listened to such speeches – or was even in the same family, or in the same house – was also tortured and butchered.

Is it so shocking to think that the same instincts that compel us to run from a bear would also compel us to fear and shun those who speak the truth about power?

A bear can be out-run – thugs with clubs in the name of the King cannot.

Furthermore, those at the peak of the pyramid of bloody power always sent spies radiating out through the community, attempting to root out those who might be open to the truth about power. These oily beasts would curl up to peasants, speak subtle treason, and look for agreement. Any slave who hesitated to repel their words would be dragged into the street and dismembered.

Revolution was impossible; the truth was suicidal, and virtually everyone who whispered about the iniquity of power was a slaughtering spy.
When the truth about power enters into a conversation, Stone Age defences rise from the base of the brain, creating near pathological anxiety and hostility. In a moment, a civilised coffee shop becomes a fire-lit cave, and all the shiny pleasantries of modern democracy shatter before the emotional percussion of a falling club – revealed in the hands of the ruler only the moment before it lands on the skull of the foolish listener.

These associations are not conscious. This unbelievably rapid sequence of thought is imprinted below the awareness of the ego we know and love so well.

The greater the danger to life, the more automatic and unconscious the response to that danger needs to be. If you accidentally put your hand into a fire, your spine will detect the pain and jerk your hand back before the signals reach your brain.<ref>Biologically speaking, of course, your spine is only using you to make another spine, and so its self-interest makes perfect sense.</ref> If an unexpected noise reaches your ears while you are sleeping, your brain will yank you awake, your fight or flight adrenaline already pumping.

We are ringed by automatic sentinels that reason not from the reason of the present, but rather from the imminent deaths of history.

If you are not aware of the depth and power of the unconscious, then you will introduce the topic that taxation equals force with no understanding whatsoever of the degree of stress, anxiety, and hostility that your words evoke in others.

The person that you are talking to will probably not have any greater understanding of what is happening to them than you do. The hostility that they feel will arise in them as if out of nowhere.

It is a well-recognised psychological phenomenon that most people will almost automatically and immediately invent conceptual reasons for unexpected emotional distress. First comes the shock, or the fear, or the anger – and then comes the “explanation,” after the fact. Almost everyone reasons ex post facto, in reaction to unexpected emotional distress. Almost every argument you will ever hear is a form of emotional self-management, designed to keep the real truth at bay – not from you, but rather from the person who is arguing.

When someone hears that taxation is force, their unconscious hears all of the implications contained in that statement immediately, at light speed, and leaps into action to protect them from being tortured and killed.

The unconscious does not have a calendar. The unconscious has never heard of the Bill of Rights, or free speech.

The unconscious is a fierce guardian, blind to time.

This aspect of our unconscious developed in a time when we saw people who spoke the truth – or listened to the truth – slaughtered on a whim.
Those people who with open and snowy innocence spoke the truth as it occurred to them fill half the unnamed pits of our genocidal history. They did not survive to pass their mutations along.

Those who feared the truth, and feared those who spoke the truth, did survive – to teach their children to fear and shun the truth, and to see those children who did not, taken and murdered.

We are still so early in the development of our species that the world is not run by truth, or reason, but by the unconscious, by the blind and beautiful pit-bull of history that will kill and die to save its master.

=== Anger In The Face Of Truth ===
When you speak the truth to someone – let us call him Meletus – he experiences a sudden stab of fear and irritation. He does not want to be in this conversation, but he also cannot leave it, because in the past – our collective past – that would have indicated guilt. You have put Meletus in a difficult situation, and he resents you for it.

Meletus does not believe that he is a slave, for to believe that he is a slave would be to consciously understand the true nature of political power, which is the threat of overwhelming force against the legally disarmed.

Asking Meletus to admit that he is a slave, and to accept the argument that taxation equals force is true, is the direct equivalent, to his unconscious at least, of attempting to throw him into a tank full of sharks.

Historically, slaves were never allowed to point out the violence of their rulers, or to consider themselves slaves at all, since that was just another way of pointing out such violence. Thus Meletus must make up justifications for his rulers because he is frightened of the truth of their violence – because throughout history accepting or speaking that truth got people killed.

Thus, you provoke anxiety in Meletus – anxiety that he cannot consciously admit to himself, since that leads down the path to real physical danger. You have also provoked a feeling of humiliation in him, by creating fear and anxiety within him that he has to avoid.

=== Levelling ===
Most adults, when they experience humiliation, attempt to “level up,” by creating an impression of false superiority. Since Meletus feels “put down” relative to you, he will strive to put you down in return, to restore his feeling of “self-esteem.”<ref>For more on this, see just about any Doctor Phil show you can find.</ref>

How many times do libertarians experience condescension from those they bring the “TEF” argument to?

How often have libertarians been portrayed – in word or in deed – as naive, oddly resentful, out of touch, or as pointless mavericks, hopeless theorisers, and ungrateful citizens?

How many times do libertarians have to be lectured to about the “social contract,” and the “free-market of democracy,” and the “right to leave if you do not approve,” and so on?

How many times do libertarians have to see their arguments against violence re-framed as arguments against voluntarism?

How many times do libertarians have to see their arguments for voluntarism re-framed as arguments for violence?

Apparently, that number, in the absence of psychological understanding, appears to be functionally infinite.

=== The Fear Of Others ===
Deep down, everybody knows that what is called “society” is little more than a series of violent mythologies designed to keep the powers that be aloft.

Biologically, people are designed for conformity with the group rather than integrity to the truth, since conformity encouraged survival, and integrity mostly got you killed.

When you ask someone to admit the violence and mythology of what they call “morality,” it is not the rulers who primarily make them afraid, but rather it is their peer social group – their friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, and family.

I say this based on twenty-five years of experience – I am sure you have had exactly the same experience – which is that I have been arguing for voluntarism and freedom for decades, and have never once been attacked, sanctioned, or even goosed by state agents.

No, it is always and forever only my fellow citizens who attack the truth – who attack me, rather, since the truth cannot be “attacked,” but only accepted or disproved.

When I posed a series of rational and empirical questions and criticisms of the efficacy of the Ron Paul campaign, I was not audited by the IRS or cornered by men in black. Rather, it was the libertarian community and the Ron Paul supporters who turned against me.

Everyone knows that when you begin to question the philosophical and moral assumptions – often unconscious, to be sure, but even more dangerous because of that – of your peer social group, they will turn on you most savagely.

Every Christian knows that if they begin to persistently question the existence of God, they will be rapidly ejected from their supposedly loving peer group. And they also know, deep down, that they will be ejected not because they are wrong, but rather because they are right. Meletus decided to attack Socrates, rather than any of the other thousands of Sophists infesting the culture of ancient Greece – because Socrates was right – not necessarily in all his conclusions, since no one achieves that, but rather in his fluid, empirical, and rational methodology for approaching the truth.

Everyone knows that what they consider necessary conformity is actually just enslavement to error.

Everyone knows that it is not the state that keeps us in chains; we keep each other in chains. The state merely profits from our willingness – eagerness even – to attack each other.

It is far cheaper to keep slaves when the slaves eagerly police themselves.

Religion is fundamentally not a belief in an invisible God, but the fear of attack by the peer group.

Statism is fundamentally not the belief that the government is virtuous, but the fear of attack by the peer group if one dares to say otherwise.
Libertarianism is fundamentally not the belief that political action, religious affiliation, and academic education will bring freedom, but rather the fear of attack by the libertarian peer group if one dares to question these axioms.

== On A Personal Note ==
I came relatively late in life to the libertarian movement – I had nothing to do with it until my late thirties, less than three years ago.

Like most people who come to a new movement which seems compatible with many values they already hold, I took what libertarians said mostly at face value. When they talked of their genuine desires to free the world from statism, I thought: excellent! When their articles exploded many of the mythologies I had long suspected as false (“Lincoln freed the slaves!”), I was thrilled! I dug deep into libertarian literature with great excitement and optimism.

I suppose it was because I brought other, more disciplined and empirical skills and experiences to the table – my entrepreneurial endeavours in a variety of fields – that I slowly began to become uncomfortable with the libertarian habit of making baseless claims, and then becoming resentful when asked for evidence.

I had seen enough sleazy salesmen in the business world to know a con when I saw one.

In my mind, I began to divide the libertarian world into the “end of the world nut jobs” and the more rational empiricists. I placed most of the religious libertarians into the former category, but reserved places of honour within my mind for the various scholars and activists who seemed more rational.

I accepted the fact that a few of my early articles were edited to remove any content that may be conceivably offensive to religious sentiments. These articles were not about religion, and so I did not mind particularly that a few sentences or paragraphs were struck out before publication.

As I began to pod-cast, very early on I discussed the empirical and rational arguments against the existence of gods. The fact that my articles were still accepted within the libertarian community despite my outright, vocal, and strong atheism, gave me some comfort that religion was not a core topic for libertarianism.

However, when I began to talk about psychological motives, personal history, and the effect of early childhood experiences on later thoughts and feelings, I began to feel a certain chill shiver through the libertarian community.

Rumours began to spread that Freedomain Radio was some sort of cult, which “commanded” people to leave their families – despite the fact that of the roughly fifty thousand people who have listened to the show, about twenty have separated from abusive families.

I was also called “dictatorial” for asking abusive or aggressive people to stop posting on the FDR forum – about thirty in over two years, or less than one percent of the total membership – pretty good for a forum which deals with such volatile topics!

I have also been accused of “driving” the conversation in particular directions, in other words, towards psychological and relationship issues - which is a truly astounding claim, coming as it does from those who claim a deep understanding of the free market!

For those who do not seem able to grasp how the free market really works, I will provide a brief explanation.

I do not have the capacity to “drive” the conversation. I did deal with some family and psychological issues, starting at about pod-cast seventy – but if people were not interested in those theories, the topic would have been entirely dropped! I also did pod-casts on Shakespeare, which proved to be fairly uninteresting to the vast majority of my listeners, so that topic has not come up again.

The same libertarians who endlessly argue that it is impossible for a corporation to impose its will upon consumers in the free-market, and impossible to gain a dictatorial monopoly – also say that I somehow “control” and “dominate” my customers.<ref>It is interesting to me that not one of these criticisms has ever come from entrepreneurs who have actually worked in the free-market, but rather only from religious, political, and academic types – for fairly obvious reasons.</ref>

The simple fact is that I follow and talk about what my listeners are most interested in – just like any other entrepreneur. Every Sunday afternoon I ask my listeners what is uppermost in their mind. For at least eighteen months, I can scarcely think of a single topic that has been philosophical or economic in nature. Empirically, objectively, people want to talk about personal ethics, immediate relationships, and the deep struggle we all face to live with integrity in our own lives.

I do not interrupt listeners who are asking about economics and “order” them to talk about highly personal issues – as if that were even possible! Like any good entrepreneur, I let my customers drive the provision of services.

If I did not, there would be no show.

I once talked to a libertarian radio talk show host who tried to do a three-day series on personal relationships, only to have to abandon it after less than two days, due to listener indifference and outright hostility. As a listener wrote: “I listen to your show to find out what’s wrong with the government, not for dating advice!”

That is the awesome power we show hosts wield!

One of the most popular segments in Freedomain Radio was “Ask A Therapist,” where my wife answered questions about personal relationships and mental health. Those who call in to the Sunday show almost exclusively ask questions about personal relationships and mental health. When a listener contacts me for a conversation, it is almost always about personal relationships and mental health.

These are just the facts of market demand – and it is entirely ridiculous that so-called free-market “experts” believe that I can somehow magically control my customers. For the sake of all that is rational, I run a charity, and so am far more dependent on the kindness of strangers than most organisations that provide fee-based products or services!

It is also an astounding monument to hypocrisy that I have been accused of “controlling” my donators by atheist libertarians who refuse to challenge religious libertarians! If I am not dependent upon the voluntary goodwill of my donators, but can somehow magically control them, then why are libertarians so afraid to confront religious donators? Why is it that libertarianism has to endlessly appease its religious supporters, but I am somehow in total control over my donators?

Welcome to the wonderful world of psychological projection!

=== Psychology An Me ===
I have been fascinated by psychology since I was in my teens; in my early thirties I went through a few years of very intensive psychotherapy, which I found immensely positive – my wife practices psychology, and runs her own clinic, and was – to her eternal credit – the one who began pushing me towards a psychological understanding of the potentials and challenges of the freedom movement.

I did not at first understand why libertarians – who claim that empirical and rational social sciences such as economics are perfectly valid – would be so hostile towards an empirical and rational social science such as psychology. In my own naivety, I assumed that this was largely because of a lack of understanding of psychology, rather than any innate hostility towards it.

Through my show, I continued to explain the basic tenets of psychology, and participated in a number of listener conversations where I think the value of psychological understanding and deep self-knowledge was more than amply demonstrated. Through Freedomain Radio, people got out of bad relationships, and often into good relationships – they liberated themselves from unproductive and dead-end careers, and revitalised their own work environments. People achieved real freedom in their lives by leaving salaried employment and starting their own companies – and this resulted not from economic explication, but rather a psychological investigation of their own resistance to freedom, which often brought them up against the limitations of their personal relationships.

It was during this phase of Freedomain Radio that I began to hear the first mutterings and accusations that I was running some sort of cult. Several people who were participating on the Freedomain Radio board became volatile and destructive – after attempting to negotiate with them in the hopes of achieving more rational and positive behaviours, I realise that this would be impossible, and I banned them.

Although some people experience my banning of abusive and destructive people with dismay, it is perfectly consistent with my approach to relationships, which is that you try to negotiate and get what you want out of people – and offer them the same opportunity – but if you are unable to come to an agreement on mutually beneficial behaviour, you are in no way obligated to continue the relationship.

I do not view this as an entirely subjective process, of course, since I believe that verbal abuse, name-calling, and passive aggressive provocations, for instance, are not negotiable.

If I host a weekly dinner party, where anyone can drop by, I do have the right to ban people who disrupt the productivity and pleasure of the conversation through verbal abuse.

It is my house after all, and it is testament to the psychological distress of certain libertarians that they rail against my exercise of property rights, while claiming property rights to be a sacrosanct value.

The issue of the Ron Paul candidacy arose shortly after this time. Even before I knew that Ron Paul was a fundamentalist Christian, I criticised political action as merely the illusion of progress, and the draining of resources that could be used more productively elsewhere.

Most libertarians placed enormous hopes in the Ron Paul candidacy, and doubtless experienced my questions, criticisms, and empirical tests for success as irritating, if not enraging – certainly the comments that I received on my videos were spectacularly hostile, and if I had run my private emails through a profanity filter, I would have largely been looking at near-endless rows of asterisks.

I simply could not understand why money was being hurled at a “solution” without any hint of a project plan, testable milestones, and empirical verification of claims – probably as a result of my free-market experience as an entrepreneur, in both the software and artistic fields. The fact that libertarians were wildly enthusiastic about burning through tens of millions of dollars – not to mention countless hours – without once seeming to consider how else these resources could be used – struck me as more of a collective stampede off the cliff of delusion than a rational and disciplined approach to the effective allocation of time and money.

I began to get more suspicious when I saw the “dual-answer” approach to potential donators – those who were concerned with winning were told that Ron Paul could win, while those who were sceptical of that possibility were told that Ron Paul was “educating people.”
Again, I had seen enough of this nonsense in the entrepreneurial world, and spotted these manipulations pretty quickly.

Then, I saw exhortations to donate to the Ron Paul campaign – with mad claims that he could still win – when it had become, for all intents and purposes, impossible for him to do so.

To me, this began to look very close to outright fraud.

As I examined the good Doctor’s candidacy, I began to really see the seedy Christian underbelly of the libertarian movement: Ron Paul’s rejection of evolution – from a man well-trained in the scientific method, and so unable to claim backwoods ignorance – along with the crassly exploitive money-grubbing, hostility to rational questions about the efficacy of this candidacy, an increased and almost hysterical pandering to Christians (for the sake of donations of course), and a general abandonment of restraint, reason, evidence, and plain common sense.

Principles were hurled overboard like heavy crates from a sinking ship – the collective hysteria of “now or never” gripped people in its feverish fist, creating volatile and hostile “us versus them” aggression and paranoia. “If you are against Ron Paul, you are against freedom!” – a chilling echo of Bush’s “He who is not with us is against us” – showed just how far down the well of superstitious collectivism the movement had plummeted.

Those few of us who resisted the pressures of these aggressive delusions were soundly and repetitively attacked for raising rational questions during a time of general hysteria – and after the hysteria had begun to subside, we were not praised – or even recognised – for predicting the futility of the campaign in advance. Instead, ex post facto justifications were invented about the value of educating people through the campaign – again, with little to no empirical evidence.

You could also see the gruesomely irrational spectacle of Ron Paul openly saying on the Colbert Report after he lost so spectacularly that he never had any chance at all – while on the very same show, a few months earlier, he had said that there was a reasonable chance that he just might win.

Of course, this is the kind of ridiculous reversal common to those unable to admit their own corruption. If you say after you have lost spectacularly, that you really thought you could win, then you look kind of deranged, and largely out of touch with reality. If a man claims to genuinely believe that he can win Olympic gold in long-distance running, but cannot even struggle around the track once, clearly he is delusional about his own abilities. Thus it is inevitable that Ron Paul would reverse his estimation of his own chances after his spectacular failure – and without any reference to his prior “optimism” – because Ron Paul is a politician, just like every other politician. He goes to Washington and gets money for his constituents; he says whatever he needs to say to maximise his “credibility” and income in the moment, and he makes wild claims while steadfastly rejecting empirical evidence.

How could it be otherwise? He is a fundamentalist Christian.

As the success of Freedomain Radio continued to grow, I was for quite a while rather surprised at the general indifference – and outright hostility – of the libertarian community towards the show. Given that libertarianism is supposed to be all about voluntarism, surely the voluntary nature of the show would meet with their approval. Surely, given that libertarians are constantly claiming that the poor will be educated in a free society, Freedomain Radio would be a wonderful example of just that – since I give everything away for free, and rely on voluntary donations, those who cannot afford to pay for instruction can still receive it.

Surely, since the Ron Paul supporters were so devoted to educating people about liberty, after the failure of the Ron Paul candidacy, they would at least acknowledge the value of a show that continues to grow and spread arguments for freedom!

When a voluntary organisation educates tens of thousands of people without charging a penny, surely that is a wonderful example of the benevolent free market in action. In my rather deluded optimism, I pictured at least some excitement within the libertarian community about this radical application of free-market ideals, innovative use of technology, and pursuit of a highly unusual business plan. I imagined that people would be curious about the success of Freedomain Radio, and cite it as an example of the power and benevolence of voluntarism, as well as a practical example of how people can be educated who cannot afford it.

It's not like I am some entirely non-credible fringe nut – I studied English literature, economics, and psychology at the undergraduate level, and hold a Masters degree in History from an Ivy League university. I got an ‘A’ on my thesis on intellectual history, based on primary sources on Plato, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. I have been a successful entrepreneur who co-founded and sold a fairly large company, and I have also written and directed a successful play for the theatre. I have lived in England, South Africa, and Canada, and travelled throughout North America, Europe, and China for business.

As the success of the show continued to grow, and the number of pod-cast downloads started to run into the millions, the indifference and hostility of the libertarian movement as a whole started to become truly incomprehensible to me, and I decided to sit down and try to figure out what the implications were of this avoidance.

I am very glad that I did this, because I learned an enormous amount about the movement whose goals I care for very, very deeply.

This book does not result from my hostility towards libertarianism, but rather from my love of freedom, and my desire to build a rational and empirical plan to achieve it.

We cannot go through the church to achieve a free society, because on the other side of the church is always a graveyard.

For those with the eyes to see, religion is a spent force fundamentally, surviving only on the fading momentum of the past. The younger generation is far more intelligent and sceptical than we ever were, and no movement can succeed in gaining their allegiance that abases itself before the superstitions of their elders.

== Rational Libertarians ==
There are many noble and brilliant libertarians within the movement, who respect empirical evidence and reasoned arguments, who reject the existence of God – and even the validity of political action – but in general they remain “secret doubters,” who are afraid to speak their minds for fear of attack or rejection, or perhaps from a misguided belief that “infighting” is bad.

This has always struck me as a rather odd perspective for lovers of liberty to possess.

Surely, freedom is first and foremost the freedom to speak one’s mind openly and honestly, with reason and evidence as your guide. If we self-censor within the freedom movement because we are afraid of disapproval, attack, or the appearance of discord, then surely we are missing something essential and elemental about the concept of freedom.<ref>This reminds me of a prominent libertarian I met once who had unbelievably bad breath -- as my wife pointed out, it seemed odd that in a movement devoted to freedom, nobody felt free to point out this basic fact.</ref>

Either libertarianism is a rational and empirical social science, or it is a cult devoted to grabbing money from the superstitious.
If libertarianism is a rational and empirical social science – as I believe it is – then it is time to clean house.

This means ditching religious money, and the easy and sleazy money-grubbing of promising political solutions to political problems.
It also means a basic recognition of the reality that using the statist protection of academia to teach people about the free market is worse than useless – it actively discredits the values it claims to promote.

Libertarianism recognises that the state is corrupt because its proclaimed values are always undermined by special interest groups, who trumpet their high motives while grabbing cash from the public purse.

The fact that lofty ideals are so susceptible to base financial self-interest is a central libertarian criticism of the state – and rightly so!
Since the state exists as an idealistic cover for base money-grubbing, to overturn state power, libertarians must inevitably accept that people are capable of overcoming their immediate financial incentives for the sake of pursuing and achieving a higher moral goal.

Libertarians will say to highly-subsidised farmers that those farmers should be willing and able to give up their funding – and take the short-term financial hit – for the sake of a better world in the future.

Fundamentally, the power of the state cannot be broken if people cannot be convinced to place moral ideals above immediate financial gain. If people are not willing to suffer through the transition from a statist society to a free society – with all the immediate financial losses that will occur for literally tens of millions of people – then the power of the state will never be broken – or even limited – but rather will endlessly increase to the point of collapse, whereupon it will start all over again.

If libertarians are not able to put their own high moral ideals above their immediate financial gain, they have zero moral right to demand or expect this from others. How can a libertarian tell a farmer that they should live without state subsidies, and take the short-term financial losses for the sake of a better world, when libertarians themselves are completely hostile to the idea that they should live without Christian subsidies, and state protection, and take the short-term financial losses for the sake of a better world?

Well, you might say, but state money is taken at the point of a gun, while Christian money is voluntary.

There is some truth in this, but there is much more falsehood.

Christianity – like any cult or superstition – has only survived for thousands of years because it indoctrinates helpless and dependent children, frightening them with tales of eternal vigilance from sky ghosts, eternal punishments for mere thought, the innate evil of original sin, the need to beg for forgiveness for the sin of breathing – and all other varieties of mental tortures that children are utterly unable to evade or resist, as a result of their dependent status.

Libertarians endlessly rail against the pro-state propaganda of public schools, bewailing the fact that children have false ideals inflicted upon them against their will.<ref>Harry Browne said that if there was only one thing he could change about statism, it would be the privatisation of public schools, since their propaganda was the greatest barrier to the spread of libertarianism.</ref>

However, they call Christian money purely voluntary, as if children do not have the false ideas of religious superstition inflicted upon them against their will.

If you doubt that religion is a virus passed down through intergenerational propaganda, all you have to do is imagine the odds that a child raised in a remote Afghanistan village by Muslim parents, with no exposure to Christian tenets whatsoever, will end up as a note-perfect Baptist. What about a child tossed ashore from a shipwreck on a desert island? With no exposure to religious teachings whatsoever, is it likely that they will end up as an Orthodox Jew, and grow their sideburns into corkscrew curls?

Of course not.

We can debate whether or not the religious impulse is innate to the human soul – but the specific forms of religiosity are certainly not, as is evidenced by their variety and localised reproduction around the world.

Religion is the scar tissue of abusive childhood indoctrination and terrorising – to say that the money that abused children pay to avoid the reactivation of the guilt and fear that was imprinted upon them as helpless dependants is purely voluntary – well, that is to continue the exploitation of those children, by reinforcing the propaganda they will doubtless inflict upon their own children in turn.

Religious indoctrination is child abuse; the “charity” that religious organisations collect as a result of this indoctrination can scarcely be called benevolent voluntarism.

We fully recognise that a child who was raised in Stalinist Russia did not “choose” to become a communist – as they doubtless did – but rather we would be sympathetic towards them, as the victim of vicious and authoritarian propaganda.

There is functionally no difference between statist propaganda and religious propaganda – the first is inflicted through the impersonal power of the state; the second is inflicted through the personal power of the parents.

=== The Company One Keeps ===
It is a fair truism to say that a person is judged by the company they keep. When a radical, frightening, and unprecedented idea arises in the intellectual landscape, most people will immediately look for cracks, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, like water attempting to find its way through a wall.

The more unusual the claims, the higher the standard of integrity needs to be. Most of the central tenets of libertarianism are unusual, frightening, and unsettling to the vast majority of people – as a result, those people will look for any excuse to reject libertarianism as a whole.

There is no shortage of nutty ideas in the world, and most of us feel very comfortable rejecting, say, the basic beliefs of those crazed and broken souls who cut their own testicles off and killed themselves in order to merge with some comet shooting through the sky, and ride off to heaven in a blaze of flowing light.

Similarly, with regards to Scientology, I am comfortable dismissing the philosophy – such as it is – as a whole, once I understand that the thesis rests to some degree on the premise that mankind arose from lizard men crashing to Earth several million years ago.

If you are a competent mathematician, and you are handed a one hundred page proof, and you find a massive error on the first page – some-thing along the lines of “3 plus blue equals unicorn” – do you really consider it necessary to grind your way through the remaining ninety-nine pages in order to discover and elucidate every single error?

Of course not.

Life is short – which is why a woman looking for a gentleman does not go on a second date with a man who brings her to a strip club.

The requirements for integrity and rationality rise in proportion to the newness and scariness of the ideas being presented. Old ideas gain a kind of mossy momentum, and just seem true to people who grew up with them, no matter how nutty they are in reality – this of course is the basis of conservatism.

If I put out a pod-cast claiming that my neighbour can walk on water, bring people back from the dead, was born of a virgin, and can heal blindness by touching eyelids, people would assume that I was either joking or insane – but add two thousand years and a bunch of funny hats to the equation, and suddenly it all seems perfectly reasonable.

This is another reason why libertarianism’s association with Christianity has turned the movement into a shallow, ineffectual, and greedy joke.
When someone is exposed to a new idea, they generally do not delve deeply into its internal consistency, but first and foremost look at the company it keeps. If someone claims to be able to read minds, but is confined to an insane asylum, surrounded by people who believe they are Napoleon, or can fly, or are Jesus – are you likely to spend time, effort, and money validating their claim?

Add to this scenario the fact that the “mind reader” vehemently denies that they are in an insane asylum, and no one will take their claim seriously at all.

In an increasingly secular society, when someone comes across libertarian claims, the first thing that they often do is look at the company that libertarians keep.

If they find that libertarians hold in great esteem and high regard those who reject the theory of evolution, believe that people can come back from the dead, that virgins can give birth, and that the world was created in six days by some invisible being – and crawl all over each other in a mad stampede to take money from such deluded fools – then they will inevitably be drawn to the rather intelligent conclusion that the standards of proof, evidence, and rationality within the libertarian movement are not particularly high, to put it mildly.

Either they are going to come across libertarians who believe all of this superstitious nonsense – in which case, how are they going to take anything libertarians preach seriously? – or they are going to come across those who hold libertarian beliefs, and who are atheists.

In this case, their interest may actually be piqued – which methodology, they wonder, will win this battle? Will it be the rational empiricism of the atheists, or the delusional superstitions of the theists?

Ah, sadly, almost at once they will find that the atheists claim to hold the theists in high regard, and praise the superstitious for their devotion to truth and virtue!

This will all seem to be far too complex and ridiculous a riddle to even bother trying to unravel – how on earth can rational empiricists proffer such rank praise to the superstitious?

If they decide to spend another few minutes thinking about libertarianism, they will undoubtedly conclude that the majority of its funding comes from religious organisations – and a moment’s research will confirm this fact.<ref>For instance, you can have a look here; most of the donating organisations are financial supporters of organised religion: http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=51 http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1174</ref>

“Ah,” they will say, “so these supposed ‘rationalists’ have just sold out to the highest bidder, which in this case happens to be the Christians.”

They will understand that, like any politician or cowed employee, libertarians of all kinds are simply bowing to those who pay the bills.

Not only will such a potential convert to libertarianism roll their eyes in the face of such pompous hypocrisy, but they will also understand that integrity to the truth is completely optional for libertarians – and in fact, if they spend even a few additional minutes researching the subject, and find out that there appears to be no self-criticism within the movement at all of this bottomless betrayal of reason and evidence – then they will quickly understand that the subjugation of reason to religion is not a topic that these heroic libertarians feel safe even discussing.

After this sad journey into pathetic compromise and self abasement before the deep pockets of deep prejudice, will our potential friend view libertarian theories as a whole as trustworthy? If libertarians slavishly praise – for mere money, no less – religious bigotry and rank irrationality, will they assume that their theories will be monuments to the highest and most challenging forms of integrity?

Of course not.

They will understand that libertarians as a whole are actually more corrupt than the religious – because the religious at least do not praise the abstract principles of reason and evidence, but rather worship the whims of faith.

It is one thing for a witch doctor to do a rain dance; it is quite another for a climatologist to do a rain dance. The witch doctor at least does not claim to respect the scientific method, and has not been trained in rational empiricism.

We would not trust a supposedly-rational climatologist who did a rain dance because a witch doctor offered them a few beads – in the same way, the average citizen will recoil from the hypocrisy of libertarianism, recognising that it is a ridiculously self-contradictory discipline that praises science and superstition equally, but always defers to superstition.

Those with the stomach to dig a little deeper into the movement will wonder how those who claim that government power always leads to evil deal with the complex problems of living within a statist society. As soon as they see how many academic professors there are in the libertarian movement, I am sure that they will be intrigued as to how this contradiction is dealt with.

“Wow, these people claim that state power is evil, and always leads to evil – yet they live lives almost entirely subsidised and protected by the state – what ingenious arguments have they devised to justify this astounding contradiction?”

Sadly, they will find no ingenious arguments, merely sniggering assertions that it is a wonderful thing to use state power to teach libertarian concepts – in other words, that evil can be used to do good!

“But that is amazing!” our friend will think. “Is it not the case that everyone who uses state power believes that he or she is able to use this awesome violence to create good? Do not those who run the welfare state genuinely accept that while charity would be preferable, it is regrettably necessary, given the current circumstances, to use state power to help the poor? Do not those who run the war on drugs genuinely believe that while a voluntarily drug-free society would be preferable, it is regrettably necessary, given the current circumstances, to use state power to prevent drug use?”

The list would go on and on within their mind – the endless, woeful litany of those who condemn the use of violence in the hands of others, but believe that in their hands, such violence can be turned to the service of virtue!

=== A Universal Contradiction? ===
I would like to briefly address the criticism that is sometimes levelled at me with regards to profiting from state power, which is that in my entrepreneurial career, there were times when I competed for and won sales contracts with government agencies, and cashed those checks, which contributed to my own income.

This of course is a perfectly fair question, and I would like to do what I can to address it.

First of all, it is impossible to live within a modern statist society and not do business – either directly, or indirectly – with the government. Even if I had avoided government contracts, I would have ended up doing business with private companies that do a lot of business with the government, and would have received the same “blood money,” except with a middleman.

Secondly, at no point that I can recall was the income from government agencies more than ten percent of total revenues. In fact, towards the end of my tenure as a Chief Technical Officer, we began to move away from government contracts, because they were rarely as profitable as private contracts.

Thirdly, we as a corporation were taxed at a very heavy level, and I do not think that recovering money that is taken by force is a particularly egregious moral problem. For instance, I also wrote up, submitted, and defended tax credits that we were entitled to under Canadian law for doing original research and development in the software field. I was perfectly happy to get that money back, and used it to expand the company.
Fourthly, during the time that I was occasionally pursuing and winning government contracts, I was not a public advocate of the value and virtue of a purely free-market. I was not at the time even an anarchist – I was a typical Objectivist minarchist, in that I believed the government was required for the military, the law courts, and the prison system. In the ideal society that I believed in at the time, there would still be government contracts that would still need to be pursued and won through free-market competition. I no longer hold these beliefs, and it was not particularly long after I became a fully fledged anarchist that I left the business world completely, and set up a purely voluntary, ultimate free-market business called Freedomain Radio, which relies on no government contracts, gets no special government tax breaks, and receives of course no government subsidies of any kind – or even offers tax receipts for charitable donations. I cannot imagine a more voluntary business than the one I am running now, which is about as consistent with my values as I can conceivably get without building a time machine and vaulting forward two hundred years into Libertopia.

Fifthly – and I think most importantly – I strongly believe that there is an enormous difference between competing for a government contract on the free and open market – without state protection or direct subsidisation of any kind – and joining a state protected and state enforced union which violently prevents competition, subsidies about ninety percent of your salary, and will throw anyone in jail who dares to fire you.
For me, this is the difference between working for Federal Express, and occasionally delivering government packages – and voluntarily pursuing, grabbing on to, and holding at all costs a senior position in the Post Office union.

Conflating these opposing approaches to the challenges of living within a statist society makes a mockery of both intent and integrity.

== Empiricism And This Book ==
I would like to finish this part of the book by briefly pointing out a criticism that may be floating around in your mind, which I wanted to openly address up front.

I have put forward some heavy criticisms in this book, and many of those criticisms are founded upon my opposition to those who make wild claims without empirical proof.

You may be thinking – and I do not fault you for that all of course – that I myself have made a rather large number of wild claims without providing empirical proof.

For instance, when I say that libertarianism has an innate hostility towards the discipline of psychology – and in particular, the exploration of the unconscious – because of its financial dependence upon Christianity, what is my proof for such an assertion?

This theory certainly fits and explains the consistent facts of my considerable experience over many years, and I do think that I have made logically consistent arguments as to why those who take their bread-and-butter from the insane can never consistently advocate sanity, but what is still missing is the widest objective and empirical proof for my assertions.

Unfortunately, I do not have the money to run a large study of libertarians, to discover their attitudes towards and knowledge of psychology, and compare it to those with similar educational, familial, cultural, and economic backgrounds – although I do think this would be a an utterly fascinating study!

As a result, I do not claim that my assertions are proven even to the relatively lax standards of your average social science.

However, as I consistently say in my books and pod-casts, there is absolutely no reason for you to take my word for anything.

If you doubt the empirical proof of what I say, my suggestion is this: sit down with the libertarians that you know, and ask them about psychology – their attitude towards it, their knowledge of it, their competence with its concepts, and their ability to apply it.

It could be the case that over twenty-five years, I have just run into an entirely unfortunate set of Objectivists and libertarians, who are almost universally and endlessly opposed to the basic concepts of psychology. I think this is statistically almost impossible, but it certainly could be the case. I have attempted to theorise as honestly as I can from the empiricism of my own somewhat substantial experience in this realm, but I would never have the temerity to suggest that you substitute my experience for your own.

When you sit down with your libertarian friends and colleagues, why not ask them how many books on psychology they have read? I have found libertarians as a whole to be voracious readers, who devour books on a wide variety of subjects and topics, but I have found them to be woefully ignorant of even the basic concepts of psychology, and have learned over the years that it is the one subject that is almost universally avoided.

Secondly, you can ask your libertarian friends – with all due sensitivity, of course – if they have ever been in therapy. Therapy is not at all that unusual a pursuit for people who are attempting to do great and challenging things with their lives, just as athletic coaching is common for those wishing to rise to the top of their game. Since libertarians set enormously high goals for themselves – the reduction of state power, the liberalisation of the economy, and so on – the personal and emotional stresses that arise from pursuing – and eternally failing at – these goals is something that therapy would help alleviate.

Thus it should be entirely possible for you to find at least a few libertarian friends who have gone to therapy – and, if they have successfully completed a therapeutic program, they should not be horrified or embarrassed to talk about it, since they would have come out of such a process with greater empathy towards themselves and others.

If you cannot find any libertarian friends who have gone into therapy, then this would be some empirical evidence for the truth of my propositions. If you cannot find any libertarian friends who have read much – or any – psychology,137 then this also would be empirical evidence for my theories.

Do you think it hypocritical that I do not provide an excess of empirical evidence for my criticism that libertarians do not respect empirical evidence?

Again, this is an assertion borne out of my own extensive personal experience, and data that has been posted above, but there is no reason whatsoever for you to take my experience and information at face value, of course.

If you disagree with me that libertarians avoid empirical evidence for the truths of their propositions, all you have to do is ask your libertarian friends about the evidence that they have seen for a variety of libertarian goals, such as:
#Political action is the most effective way to reduce the power of the state.
#Academic education is the most successful way to establish the credibility of libertarian theories.
#Ron Paul successfully spread the word about libertarianism, and brought many more people to the cause then he drove away.
#As a result of the Ron Paul campaign, many more people are interested in libertarian ideas.
#The Ron Paul candidacy was the best of many alternatives that could have been pursued to credibly disseminate libertarian ideas.
#Libertarianism’s association with – and financial dependence on – fundamentalist Christianity is a highly beneficial way to convince people of the rationality and empiricism of libertarian ideals.

If they can provide empirical studies and evidence to support the above libertarian axioms, I would be highly grateful if you could email these to me, so that I could retract everything that I have said in this book, and grovel apologetically before those I have unjustly accused.

If this empirical evidence exists, and all of the above has been established through independent verification and research, then libertarianism is a complete, futile, and hopeless disaster, for one simple, sad reason:

If we are doing the best that we can possibly do, and we are continuing to fail so disastrously, success is utterly and completely impossible.

== We Can Only Hope We Are Screwing Up ==
I hope that this book has not given you the impression that I do not believe in the pursuit of liberty. Quite the contrary – I desperately yearn for, believe in, and avidly pursue the goal of achieving universal human liberty, though in a way that I believe has never been tried before – an approach that I will talk about in the next part of the book.

If the freedom movement is making catastrophic errors, then there is hope for human freedom, because those errors can be analysed, honestly admitted to, and corrected.

If the freedom movement is not making catastrophic errors, then there is no hope for human freedom, because if the best that we can do is complete failure, then there is actually little point even trying. We may continue to pursue liberty as a hobby, or a way of killing time before we fall into inevitable fascism, but we should not at all delude ourselves that we will alter the eventual outcome one little bit. We may be rank determinists, and pretend briefly that we have free will, in order to play around with the concept, but we recognise that it is a childish delusion that we sometimes regress into, so to speak.

If we are only doing a few little things wrong, then the same analysis applies – if we are driving directly off a cliff edge, but can only turn the steering wheel a single inch either way, we will still go off the cliff edge, the only difference being that our tire marks might be a few feet one way or the other.

If, however, the freedom movement is making a large series of utterly disastrous decisions, then our failures can be turned into hope, change, and true effectiveness.

It really comes down to this:

If we are willing to put our own petty egos and vanities aside, and focus on what we really should be focusing on, which is doing whatever it takes to ensure that the world becomes truly free, then we can be the foundation of the freedom of the future.

If we are willing to stop doing that which does not work, pause and look inward, look critically, and really rebuild what it is that we are doing from the ground up, empirically, rationally, with the constant feedback of perpetual post mortems – if we dedicate ourselves to continuous improvement, we can truly build a bridge to the future brick by brick, knowing that although it may take generations, we shall get there as surely as a rain drop will hit the ground.

If we are willing to rebuild this movement from the ground up, letting go of the financial incentives of enslavement to superstition, and building a new constituency of truly rational and empirical souls, then we shall create a movement that will not be constantly tripping over its own contradictions.

If we are willing to let go of the mistakes made at the beginnings of libertarianism – and all the mistakes that followed – then we shall be able to look to the future, instead of always being dragged backwards into a worship of the past – and we shall be able to gain the allegiance and respect of a new generation of secular thinkers, who will bring a shining rationality into the world that we can as yet only dream of.

If we are willing to accept that we shall not see the liberty that we want within our own lifetime – if we accept that what we are engaged in is a multi-generational project – we will finally be able to quit the useless and feverish pseudo-activities and mindless busy work that is born of impatience.

If we accept the clear historical lesson that all significant leaps forward in human liberty – from the elimination of slavery to the expansion of the rights of women and children to the growth of the market system itself – were all multi-generational projects, and that those who began them did not live to see their completion – then we can give up our mad random sprinting and snatching at thin air in the hopes of achieving something substantial, but rather with patience and dedication, we can sit down and work out a plan based on historical evidence, the modern understanding of the human psyche, a rejection of bigotry and superstition – a plan that will work.

I do believe that I have the bare outlines of just such a plan, but I will not talk about it in this part of the book, because I think that we all need to mourn the loss of false hope before rolling up our sleeves and starting to build the reality of future freedom, brick by brick.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

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Anarchei: /* Empiricism And This Book */

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:20:47Z

Anarchei: /* Rational Libertarians */

{{header
| title = [[Achieving Freedom]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2008
| section = Root Causes
| previous = [[Achieving Freedom/1|How (Not) To Achieve Freedom]]
| next =
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== The Effects Of Ethics ==
A deep understanding of the non-aggression principle (NAP) creates a significant moral divide, with those who initiate the use of force on one side, and those who reject the initiation of the use of force on the other.<ref>For more on this, please have a look at my book on Universally Preferable Behaviour, available for free on my website.</ref>

Those who initiate the use of force can rationally be called evil, while those who actively support the initiation of the use of force – who justify it morally – can be called corrupt.

It is also reasonable to accept that someone cannot be responsible for knowledge they do not yet possess. We can easily understand that while a modern doctor who does not prescribe antibiotics for a virulent infection is grossly negligent, a medieval doctor who had no access to antibiotics cannot be held to the same standard.

Between these two extremes lies a kind of “grey area.” When antibiotics were first being introduced and tested, it would have been irresponsible for a doctor to prescribe them for every conceivable ailment (as remains the case today) – however, after a certain amount of testing and verification had been completed, the balance tipped towards prescription.

Someone who has never heard the argument that taxation is force cannot be morally condemned for their ignorance. A baby is not “uneducated” – rather they are in a state of “pre-education.” I do not know Mandarin – this does not make me a fool, or ignorant in general, but rather it is merely the case that I lack the knowledge to speak Mandarin.

The same is true in terms of moral knowledge. I only came to a deep understanding and a consistent theoretical application of the NAP in my philosophy in my thirties – close to twenty years after I began to study philosophy. This does not mean that I was morally corrupt or evil in my twenties, but rather that I was in the pursuit of knowledge that I had not attained as yet. I did not have exposure to some of the more consistent moral arguments in favour of a stateless society, although I must confess that I did on occasion feel a certain amount of unease with the Objectivist approach to certain issues, particularly in terms of ethics.

It was through an acceptance of this unease that I began to develop more original approaches to the issues I found lacking in other philosophies. I certainly make no claim to originality in all these areas, all that I can say for sure is that these ideas were new to me, whether they were new to the world is not something I can really speak to, since I prefer the generation of new ideas to the comparison of those ideas with every other school of thought.

Someone cannot be considered immoral for failing to understand that taxation is force – the crux of the issue arises when they are first exposed to the argument that taxation is force.

This argument is emotionally trying. The fundamental alienation that spreads in the soul of a person who begins to understand that taxation is force is hard to bear.

When a powerful and foundational moral argument is introduced to a person in adulthood, the emotional recoil that they experience is really based upon what has been missing from the moral discourse of their society.

=== The Libertarian Division ===
Libertarians of all kinds are constantly making the basic moral argument that taxation is force, and that the government is a violent institution. As moral theories go, that this is not exactly quantum physics. Problems such as abortion, “lifeboat scenarios,” homesteading, capital punishment, and so on are all highly challenging and controversial – the fact that we pay taxes because we are threatened with jail is not.

Why, then, is this basic fact still so endlessly denied, evaded, fogged, and rejected within society?

One of the central problems with pursuing an illusory solution to a genuine challenge – religion, academia, political action – is that it avoids the necessity of elemental self-criticism.

In the business world, this process is called a post mortem, or a strict and stringent review of even a successful project, to create a list of “lessons learned,” and so pursue a program of continuous improvement. Unsuccessful projects are analysed in great detail, and improved practices are put into place to help avoid such catastrophes in the future.

Coming from the business entrepreneurial world, it is truly shocking to me to see the degree to which libertarians avoid performing any kind of post mortems on their projects. The same is true of academics and priests, of course.

The most astounding statements are made with no empirical evidence whatsoever – “Ron Paul can win!” “Educating the public will bring about political freedom!” “Religious beliefs are an essential component of human liberty!”

Even statements made in private, to me personally, are wild assertions – again, with no empirical evidence or reasoning whatsoever. I have been told that libertarians dare not speak about their atheism openly, for fear of alienating Christian supporters – on the assumption that such an alienation would be disastrous for the freedom movement. But how is this known for sure? What logical reasoning or empirical evidence is brought to bear on this assumption?

When I was a young man, I attended the National Theatre School in Montreal, Canada for two years, studying playwriting and acting. I had the juicy role of Cornwall in King Lear, and I vividly remember one rehearsal where we evil characters got news of a disaster. As dedicated method actors, we all turned our attention inwards, and thought about dead kittens and sad films. The director stared at us with shock, horror, and anger. “How the hell am I supposed to know that you have just received the worst news of your lives?”

I tried to explain to him – and how earnest I was – that if I change my inward thinking, it will communicate itself to the audience in some magical and unconscious manner.

His lip curled in scorn, and he asked, “So let us say that I have paid twenty dollars to come and see this play, and I am in row two hundred in the theatre, how is it that I’m supposed to psychically commune with you to understand that your slightly drooping mouth indicates some sort of inner horror?”

All of us actors resisted this crass and coarse showmanship, preferring to imagine that some movie camera was virtually up our noses, and could catch the slightest change in our facial expressions. The next time we rehearsed the scene, again, we went inwards and summoned up visions of bad news in our distant histories. The director leapt up, grabbed the chair that he was sitting on, and threw it across the stage.

He whirled to us, and said: “Do any of you not understand that I am pissed off right now? If you were in row two hundred, would you still be able to somehow figure out that I am pissed off? I don’t care if you do cartwheels or start juggling, just do something when you hear, as these characters, the worst news of your entire fucking lives!”

Strangely enough, this advice followed me very productively into the business world. Whenever a disaster occurred – and troubles come not as single spies, but in battalions, in the entrepreneurial world – I would sometimes hear in my ear this director’s commandment that when something bad occurs, the important thing is to do something – in a way, it does not even really matter what, because anything is better than standing and staring.
I suppose that I have brought some of this energy to the libertarian world, and constantly feel surprised – which itself is telling – that an intensely pro-business movement so studiously avoids criticism and the exploration of alternatives in the face of disaster.

It took me quite some time to really begin to understand what is going on in the world of libertarianism that inevitably produces this avoidance. I resisted for quite a long time the inevitable conclusions – the analysis that I talk about in this book – but then I basically thought:

“Okay, let us say that I the Chief Operating Officer at a big company, and I have a division called Libertarianism. This division has been making claims for decades about its ability to increase the size of its market share, to the point where it actually has a dominant majority in the market. However, when I look at the actual performance results of this division, I see that the market – government power – has actually gotten massively larger, while the market share – libertarian votes – has actually shrunk to near insignificance, relative to government power.
“This Libertarian division has been sort of a pet project of a doddering CEO (his name is Christian, of course) for quite some time, and it has not been subjected to any of the rigours and disciplines of the free market, because it has received funding from Christian regardless of whether it even remotely achieves its goals. As the COO, I cannot overturn the decisions of the CEO.

“This Division is full of very, very smart people, with doctorates and masters, all sorts of connections and amazing writing abilities, and rich experience in marketing and advertising – so it is not a lack of intelligence or ability that has made this Division so wildly disastrous. This division is full of people who keep talking about how a lack of market discipline and consequences for one’s actions, end up creating lazy and inefficient organisations – so they even have the theoretical understanding of what has caused their own current state.

“Furthermore, this Division has ended up telling our CEO – Christian – whatever he wants to hear, because he is the source of their funding, not the market that they claim they are trying to take over.”

If I were a business executive faced with this problem, it is not too hard to figure out the best course of action.

First of all, I would do whatever I could to stop Christian from funding this Division, because if he continues to fund it, all of the energy and talents of these brilliant people will be entirely wasted, because people respond to incentives, and he who pays the piper calls the tune, and it is essential to turn the attentions of these employees to the actual market, rather than this doddering executive.

Secondly, I would continually remind the people in this Division that they had not in fact achieved any of the goals that they had set for themselves – or, if they had achieved them, there was no way of knowing, because nothing was being tested, measured, reported on, and there were no post mortems whatsoever for any of the failed projects.

As long as Christian kept funding this Libertarian Division, I would be fully aware that the likelihood of instilling any responsibility for the actual achievement of goals, and creating any initiative or desire to change tactics or existing approaches, would be impossible. There would be no point attempting to hire people with greater discipline and focus to join this group, because such people would simply be ignored, scorned, and protected from their own failures. This Libertarian Division, like everyone else, knows exactly on which side its bread is buttered.

I would spend some time trying to get this Libertarian Division to stop taking funding from Christian, by writing about how bad Christian’s business judgement was, and how his money was creating an environment of laziness, pontificating, self-congratulation – and utter futility.
Of course, since I am a rational and empirical businessman, I would not beat my head against this wall for too long. After a certain amount of time, if no progress was being made, and if the heads of this Division simply stopped responding to my emails and phone calls, then I would take another approach – you could call it writing a book, if you like.

I could scarcely criticise the heads of this Libertarian Division for failing to be self-critical and empirical, and continue to beat my head against the walls of their indifference and hostility. I would put my criticisms out there, and see what response came back – if those criticisms were ignored, and I were personally attacked repeatedly by employees of this Libertarian Division, then of course I would accept that reality is what it is, and take another course.

Since I was unable to stop Christian’s funding, and since I was unable to get the leaders of the Libertarian Division to review their failures and alter their course of action, I would take the next step in attempting to rescue the goal that we all supposedly share.

I would appeal to the greed of those who wish to spend their lives in pursuit of something which can be achieved, and who wish to add to the practical and achievable virtue in the world, and who wish to begin laying the foundations for a human liberty which can in fact be won.

If a friend who is eager for an enjoyable, productive, and positive work environment tells you that they want to join the post office, what would you tell them?

Surely, you would tell him that joining the post office is a terrible decision, because forty percent of post office employees are ex-military, a stifling and soul crushing union controls everything, there is no free market discipline or opportunity, and everything is politics, abuse, futility, and annoyance.

It is not likely that you will be able to talk people out of being postal workers if they are only a few years from retirement, or are heavily invested in their careers, or who actually do not want to have anything to do with the free market, but rather want to sit around on their unionised asses, eating doughnuts, and bitching about their supervisors.

Thus, to deal with this Libertarian Division, I would focus my efforts not on cutting off Christian’s funding, which is impossible, or on trying to talk long-time division employees out of ditching their over-funded privileges – but rather, the best thing that I could do for the company as a whole would be to try to prevent as many people as possible from acting under the delusion that joining the Libertarian Division would bring them any real happiness, or efficacy, or the contentment and self-esteem that comes from tangible achievement.

I would do my best to communicate to those who were looking to achieve something great with their lives that the last place they should ever go is the Libertarian Division. It is true that this Division continually talks about its grand plans, massive schemes, inevitable successes, and wonderful achievements, but I would continually point out the fact that these only exist in the fantasies of those trapped in the Division. I would continually point out the true facts of the matter, which are that the division constantly wastes money, wastes time, fails to achieve its goals, sits idly by and refuses to reform its approach despite the fact that it is eternally losing ground, gets carpal tunnel syndrome from continually patting itself on the back and publishing self congratulatory articles about its wonderful “achievements,” makes wild statements of both intent and achievement while either ignoring or viciously attacking anyone who dares to point out the basic fact that less than nothing has actually been achieved, and that making up achievements is a pitiful and delusional substitute for actually achieving something in the real world.

You cannot get people to quit the post office who are already there, but you can at least do your best to help people avoid the mistake of joining it.

That, really, is my goal in this book. I may not be able to convince you that the approach I suggest is the best one – and it may not be, for all I know. Like my director said twenty years ago, we have to do something, rather than nothing – and the first step to doing something is to recognise that we are in fact doing less than nothing.

To continue the above analogy, I may not be able to get you to become a self-starting entrepreneur, but if I can at least get you to not join the post office, I have certainly done something worthwhile.

Perhaps in the future people will look back upon the proposals in this book and call them foolish, mad, delusional, ridiculous – and that is completely fine by me! Perhaps all that will come out of this book is the understanding that what we are doing is not working, and that we need to begin to creatively assault the basic problem. I may not be able to prove that the world is round, but if all that I do is convince people that the world is not flat, at least we can begin exploring the alternatives.

== The Presence Of Absence ==
When you tell someone that taxation is coercion, what is their response? Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, they will not deal with the simple fact that their government is a prison built upon a foundation of force.

Unfortunately, due to the three false approaches described above, libertarianism as a movement has never really tried to deal with the basic fact that its most simple argument is almost universally rejected.

When we compare the taxation equals force argument (TEF) to the theory of evolution, it comes up woefully short in terms of general acceptance.
Fundamentally, the only reason that someone rejects the theory of evolution is because they are superstitious, and believes that God blew some dust and made a man in His own image, and that we are descended from that man – surprisingly enough, given that we have belly buttons, and we can assume that God does not, unless we need to start searching for His ancestry as well.

Resistance to the theory of evolution is clearly centred around religious bigotry – what have libertarians done over the past few hundred years to identify the source of the near universal rejection of the TEF?

You would think that this would be job one – there is no more important resistance to overcome for libertarians than the opposition to the TEF. If we cannot convince people that the government is force, the entire libertarian position becomes woefully incomprehensible – a random grab-bag of dislike of authority, hatred of outsiders, religious addiction, some crazed desire to return to a mythological past where the Founding Fathers could walk on water – the whole philosophy becomes little more than a nutty fringe element of incomprehensible resistance to – what? Without an understanding of the TEF argument, what on earth are libertarians obsessed with? What is the point?

The basic fact that the libertarian movement has never seriously attempted to answer the question – why do people reject the fact that taxation equals force? – is something that is almost incomprehensible, as long as we imagine that libertarianism is about getting people to accept TEF, which it is not – it is all about getting funding from Christians, and jobs for free-market academics.

If we wish to gain any kind of real traction in society – if we do not want to end up wasting our lives spinning our wheels, then we do in fact have to answer that most basic question: why are our simple arguments so universally rejected?

There comes a time in every person's life when they have to stop blaming other people.

There comes a time in any movement’s life where it has to stop blaming external circumstances.

It is hard to find where in the libertarian movement this most basic question is even asked, let alone answered. When I have brought it up, in various environments, I have gotten the most mealy-mouthed platitudes in return, such as, “Well, change takes time,” or, “People are dumb,” or, “It’s really not that easy a concept to understand,” and so on.

Again and again, in libertarianism, we see these blind assertions of arbitrary “facts” – without any evidence or reasoning whatsoever.

Naturally, this is associated with the exact same Christian habit, such as, when asking where the world came from, “God made it!”

== Why People Reject The TEF Argument ==
As I said above, and as I have argued in more emotional terms in my novel The God of Atheists, the corruptions of the present can all be traced back to the initial decisions of the past.

The decision to ally itself with Christianity turned libertarianism from a social science into a mere mascot for religious bigotry. If libertarians had remained true to the methodology of their discipline, they would have scornfully rejected the financial bait of superstition. Every movement has its price, to be sure, but I do believe that a movement dedicated to rationality, liberty, and independence from arbitrary authority should have held out for more than a few thousand dollars and a bag of musty Bibles.

Once the decision was made to join forces with superstition, a key element became immediately scrubbed from the intellectual arsenal of libertarianism.

=== Psychology ===
If you do not understand at least some of the basic tenets of psychology, you will be largely unable to break repetitive and pointless patterns.
Psychology is based upon the principle that there are unconscious and opposing forces or personas within the mind. When we look at the body, we can understand the purpose of each of the organs, given enough time and research, and there is nothing hidden within the body that prevents it from achieving its goals – or, if there is, we call it a visible disease, that we can see and hopefully treat.

In the mind, though, there is a kind of invisible cancer called avoidance, wherein thoughts which cause anxiety, fear, anger, or other kinds of emotional distress can be repressed or ignored.

There is a lot that is controversial about psychology, but three basic principles remain incontrovertible:
#Early childhood experiences have an enormous impact on personality and brain development.
#Significant aspects of the mind remain unavailable to our conscious ego (the unconscious).
#Constantly avoiding or repressing your own thoughts and feelings results in bad mental health.

The relationship between repression and anxiety is very well documented, and the most basic defence against anxiety is dissociation.

Another well documented and well understood psychological phenomenon is that of projection, which is the habit of ascribing our own negative qualities to other people or things. One common example of this which most of us who have debated over the Internet are well aware of is the phenomenon of a man coming into a debate with highly provocative or insulting opinions, who then accuses everyone else of being mysteriously “aggressive.” Similarly, people who have an abusive “inner critic” will often project their experience of endless self-attacks into some external form, such as imagining that various people are out to get them, or obsessing over government regulations or currency manipulations, and so on.

If I were a therapist, and libertarianism were a patient of mine, the first question I would ask, as it lounged on my couch, is why it sees corruption everywhere it looks.

After a certain amount of psychological exploration, we would doubtless discover – as is almost always the case – that the corruption that libertarianism sees everywhere in the world (except itself!) is actually rooted in its own hypocritical decisions. This would actually explain why libertarianism fundamentally does not actually want to eliminate corruption in the world beyond, because that would be psychologically disastrous to most of those involved in the movement.

If we lose the ability to project our negative traits onto some other person or entity, we actually experience the anxiety, fear, and rage within ourselves.

When libertarians decided to take Christian cash, they automatically and unconsciously decided that theirs was a movement that was going to be entirely hostile towards psychology and any depth of self-knowledge.

The reason for this is that all religion is profoundly anti-psychological in nature. The simple reason for this is that God himself is such a primal projection of human nature – fears, desires, and self-importance – that in order to preserve the fantasy that God exists somewhere “out there,” religion has to virulently and endlessly oppose the exploration of the self and an understanding of psychology.

One of the main components of achieving deep self-knowledge is the differentiation between “self” and “other.” This sounds ridiculously simple, but it is actually quite complex. I can only really touch on the surface of this journey, but to give a simple example, when we look at a sports fan painting themselves in silly colours and madly cheering some team, we can easily see that such a person clearly has invested their ego, happiness, and fears, into the uncontrollable actions of others. This is an example of confusing the world, and the people in it, for yourself.
Similarly, when someone gets all choked up and dewy-eyed when a flag is raised, or a song is played, then clearly they are mistaking their own personality and values for some external symbol such as a piece of cloth or some notes of music.

It is really impossible to genuinely know yourself if you keep confusing yourself for people in costume, or people playing a sport, or pieces of cloth, or strains of music, or a race, or a language, or a geography – or an imaginary God.

Self-knowledge requires a strong and clear differentiation between who you are, and what everything else is. You cannot accurately identify a cow if you keep thinking that a cow is a “country,” or a “noble soldier,” or “loyalty,” or your “hope for victory,” or a “Jewish zombie who flew up to heaven and eternally judges your brain.”

The growth of psychological and emotional maturity is the slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is.

Again, this sounds ridiculously easy, but it is very often blindingly difficult. Most people wander around the world with highly reflective sunglasses on – but pointing the wrong way – so that they are only seeing a distorted reflection of themselves, rather than the world itself.
Religion is the most primal projection mechanism of all. We are alive, we possess rational consciousness; the universe is not alive, and does not possess rational consciousness. We are born, the universe is not. We worry about our virtue, the universe does not. We bring truth into the universe, the universe does not bring truth to us.<ref>For more information on this, you might be interested in my video/audio series “An Introduction to Philosophy,” available on my website at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/videos.html</ref> The degree to which religion facilitates the projection of anthropomorphic characteristics into a dead and empty universe is truly staggering when you begin to really see it.

The pursuit of self-knowledge is in many ways the end of religion. By aligning itself with the primitive superstition of psychological projection, libertarianism entirely walled off its access to one of the greatest insights of modernity, which is the discovery and exploration of the unconscious.

It is in the unconscious that we find the answer as to why people consistently reject the simple and obvious argument that taxation equals force.

The unconscious is an enormous aspect of the mind that processes empirical information with staggering rapidity, and provides value-based responses in the form of emotional reactions.

The causal chain of processing that occurs in the unconscious is unavailable to the conscious mind without a great deal of introspection and self-knowledge. What cognitive psychologists call “core beliefs” only occur to us consciously as feelings. Feelings do result from cognitive associations – a species of logical reasoning, so to speak – but those associations are not easily available to the conscious mind.

We fully understand that if we stick our hand into a fire, a lack of knowledge of neurobiology will not prevent us from experiencing pain. In the same way, a lack of conscious understanding of our core beliefs will not prevent us from reacting emotionally to those beliefs.

In fact, the less we consciously understand our deepest thoughts and feelings, the more those thoughts and feelings have “the ring of truth,” so to speak.

For instance, if we do not understand that patriotism is a collective delusion – the theft of the pride of virtue through the accident of geography – then the warm glow that we feel in the presence of patriotism remains unquestioned for us. As a consequence, when we are evaluating information related to our country, our unconscious tendency will be to automatically accept that which is most favourable to our delusional emotional state, and reject with hostility that which punctures the vanity of our fantasy attachment.

However, once we realise that our attachment to a mere concept (“America!”) is empirically invalid and emotionally hollow, we can begin to deal with our emotions as they really are, with regards to ourselves, and our own personal history, and we can begin to uncover our core beliefs, which are generally formed very early in life, up to the age of five or so, as a result of our early childhood experiences.

Such a process, of course, scarcely benefits those who profit from patriotism.

In the same way, once we understand that there is no God, we go through the natural disorientation and emotional emptiness that our former hysterical “worship” was designed to cover up. In a very real way, this is the inevitable withdrawal that comes when you stop taking a mind-altering drug.

All of the thoughts and emotions that formerly were invested in the fantasy projection of a god now collapse back into the personality, and can be dealt with as self-generated phenomena – not stimulated by some external deity, but created in the personality through personal history and prior decisions.

This is the process known to Jungian psychologists as individuation, or the recognition that all internal emotional states are generated by internal phenomena – not by externalities like stained glass, near-naked bleeding weeping gods, bits of stained cloth, or strains of music.
The incredible value that results from the difficult process of individuation is an understanding and mastery of one’s own internal state. No longer are you like the hysterical sports fan whose happiness trembles on the spot where a leather ball may – or may not – land. No longer are you like the brain-addled patriot, who takes wild existential pride in the proximity of certain dirt to their mother’s womb. No longer are you the desperate and fearful religious addict, who begs for the favours and fears the punishments of a God that really “lives” deep within their own brain, in their own amygdala and hypothalamus, shouting up from the invisible caves of early childhood.

When you ally yourself with an organisation that profits from keeping people in a state of psychological retardation, which flourishes only by provoking the most dangerous and infantile aspects of human consciousness, and which grows only as the self-knowledge of its members shrinks, you are not building a bridge to the future, but rather voluntarily throwing yourself into a chasm of prehistory.

Libertarians know this – unconsciously, of course – and that is why they worship a time before the rise of psychology – the golden days of the Founding Fathers, stirring writings and noble paintings, when the Constitution was written with fiery words on the tapestry of history, and a new nation was forged out of the blah blah blah...

On a much smaller level, of course, this is why so many libertarians turned against my show – Freedomain Radio – when I and my listeners began to really talk about psychology and self-knowledge.

This is an indication of the astoundingly rapid processing that occurs in the unconscious. The moment that my show began to turn towards early childhood experiences, practical self-knowledge, emotional defences, and the necessity of withdrawing emotional projections from the world, all the former support I had in the libertarian community mysteriously dried up.

Unconsciously, a sequence flashed with enormous rapidity through the minds of most libertarians, which went a little something like this:
*ZOMG!
*Stef is talking about undoing emotional defences and psychological projections!
*Religion is based on emotional defences and psychological projections!
*Libertarianism is based on religion!
*Thus Stef is talking about undoing libertarianism!
*I need a pay cheque!
*ZOMG!

The fundamental reason that libertarians have never asked the basic question – why do people reject the TEF argument? – is that the answer lies in the unconscious, and in deep knowledge of both the self and of other people.

In other words, the answer lies in that which unravels religion.

Since libertarianism relies on religion, and religion survives by opposing psychology, libertarians had no choice but to oppose an increase in psychological understanding.

Because libertarianism is so opposed to psychology, it cannot ask any questions which involve the unconscious. As a result, it is stuck in a blind repetition of earlier mistakes, like anyone who resists self-knowledge. It cannot examine the resistance that society as a whole has towards libertarian arguments, because that resistance is unconscious – and so it has to make up empty-headed stories to explain away its endless failures – thus guaranteeing their repetition.

Psychological, emotional, and intellectual maturity demands that when we do not know the answer to a question, we state with direct honesty: “I do not know.”

This is not an approach that has ever been part of any religion – in fact, religion is a endless cluster of deluded attacks on every reasonable question under the sun!<ref>Which, according to the Old Testament, orbits the Earth.</ref>

This is why no post mortem has ever been performed on a libertarian project – because such a post mortem would reveal an appalling ignorance as to its failure. Since libertarianism is full of enormously intelligent people, it would not take very long for them to begin to figure out why they were so abysmally ignorant – which was that they had been avoiding the question.

Once they figured out that they were avoiding the question, the next question would be: why?

And so, step-by-step, down the magic staircase they would go, to the roots of their own evasions and emotions, their fears and greed, the dark side that is in all of us, and all those other difficult and messy aspects of humanity that scare so many “rational” people.

No, no – much easier to just cash in all those juicy Christian checks and go write another useless article about the Federal Reserve.

== Withdrawing Projection: An Example ==
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has been called the “Rashomon war” – a reference to a Japanese play where everyone has wildly divergent views of a theft in the woods – due to its ever-changing justifications. None of the “factual” claims advanced to support the invasion held up to any reasonable scrutiny, even before the war began.

Those who do not understand or appreciate psychology will forever root around the surface justifications for such genocidal murders, and remain perpetually baffled and disoriented in this ever-shifting hall of mirrors.

If none of the reasons advanced are the real reasons, how can psychology help us?

If we recall the three fundamental psychological axioms – the enormous effects of early childhood experiences, the existence of the unconscious, and the dangers of repression – some possible sources for the drive to war become much clearer.

George Bush reports that he asked God whether or not to invade Iraq. As long as George imagined that he was communing with some vast interstellar intelligence outside his own skull, the “answer” that he received had the ring of an omniscient absolute.

If George knew even a little about psychology, he would understand that he was not in fact praying to God, but rather “submerging” a question into his own unconscious. Psychology fully supports our general experience that our personalities are composed of more than a single “voice,” in that we often debate with ourselves, experience contradictory impulses and ideas, experience nightly dreams that can be utterly at odds with our conscious values, and so on. In fact, it would be impossible to explain the phenomenon of creative writing – with its varied and believable characters, all coming from one mind – without accepting the reality that our personality is a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than a single and unified dictatorship of the ego.

Thus George cannot be praying to God – since God does not exist – but rather he is asking a question of himself.

When the “answer” comes back, if George is at all interested in self-knowledge and the withdrawal of projection, he will understand that it is not God telling him to invade Iraq, but rather it is an expression of his own unconscious desires.

With this understanding, George can then begin to examine why he himself wants to invade Iraq, rather than operate under the delusion that some eternal and omniscient ghost is telling him what to do.

Once George can begin to examine his own motives for invasion, he can begin the journey of self-discovery, where he will end up exploring one of the potential scenarios below – or another one, which remains obscure:
#As a result of being abused as a child by his mother, George has grown up with a deep hatred of his father, who did not protect him. This hatred is utterly unacceptable to him – and so, when Saddam Hussein threatens to kill George’s father, Hussein is actually expressing a repressed murderous wish that lies deep in George’s unconscious. By attacking Hussein, George is actually “attacking” his own desire to kill his father.<ref>In fact, Bush claimed as one of his reasons for invading Iraq the fact that Saddam Hussein “threatened to kill my dad”.</ref>
#George’s political ambitions are driven by deep feelings of personal self-hatred, resulting from his early maternal abuse, alcoholic self-medication, and general feelings of invisibility and worthlessness. Deep down, he truly hates the American public for enabling these hollow ambitions, and so takes out his rage against them by committing them to war.
#George’s antisocial tendencies were early expressed by his childhood habit of blowing up frogs – childhood cruelty towards animals is a clear sign of sadism. These expressions of inner torture were really cries for help, which went unheeded in his family, and in his society. His inner horror continually drives escalations of sadism and violence, with the purpose that someone, somewhere, will understand, and empathise with his psychological agony. Unfortunately, rather than empathise with this pain, the American public rewards him by giving him the power of life and death over millions. Since he has developed a habit of acting out violence as a cry for help, he initiates war as the ultimate expression of his truly apocalyptic self-hatred.
#When George was a child, his mother was all-powerful, and abused him emotionally and physically, scratching him violently and screaming at him. Thus George understood that power is always associated with the abuse of the helpless. Furthermore, George’s mother would veer between affection and abuse. Saddam Hussein was a “friend” of the United States, and then became an “enemy,” just as George did with his own mother when he was a child. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was essentially helpless in the face of US military power, and so George re-enacted the principle “attack the helpless person who was formerly your friend” by invading Iraq.
#Due to the mechanism of projection, George was able to project his own sadism onto Saddam Hussein – which meant that he experienced Saddam Hussein as extremely dangerous. His own increasing murderous rage – which would in fact trigger a war – was projected onto the Iraqi dictator, and so George genuinely felt that Saddam was “about to attack” him – when of course the complete opposite was true.
#The murderous rage that George experienced from his parents was re-enacted against the Iraqi children, half a million of whom died as a result of the US and UK led sanctions against Iraq – started by George’s own father after the Gulf War. Once George continued his father’s role of “destroyer of children,” he could no longer escape the role of “parental abuser,” but could only escalate the murderous destruction of others.

None of the above explanations may be valid, of course – the purpose is merely to highlight the self-knowledge that can be attained when we look inwards, into the myths that have created us, and that we have created – rather than stare into the empty heavens and dream of conversations with dead constellations.

== Why People Resist Libertarianism ==
Once we understand the amazing power of the unconscious, its uncanny ability to process enormous amounts of information virtually instantaneously, we can begin to unravel the mystery of why people reject libertarianism.

=== Resistance To Truth ===
Prior to the seventeenth century, all human societies – without exception – were founded on abuse, violence, brutality, and a strict and vicious hierarchy.<ref>For more on this, please visit http://www.psychohistory.com</ref> What fundamentally sustained this hierarchy were lies about the nature of power. Mere men were given the label “King,” and called divine, or divinely sanctioned. Other men, wearing what often appeared to be tea-cosies on their heads, were considered to be in direct and constant communication with divine beings, and so their word was the law of the gods.

The average man and woman saw things very differently indeed, deep in their heart of hearts. We can only imagine how many times throughout history men looked at a fat fool in a gold crown and knew that he was a mortal man, just like them, except worse. We cannot know how many peasants kneeled before a sneering priest, squinting up through their lowered lashes, seeing the snot in his nose, and knowing in their soul that he was just a smug and pompous version of their own selves.

In the old story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” two tailors arrive at a kingdom and promised to make the King a spectacular suit, using a thread with the magical ability to remain invisible to anyone who was not worthy of his position. They began pretending to make the suit, using no thread or cloth at all, but only miming their work. Whenever the king “wears” the work in progress, his courtiers and ministers all express amazement at the beauty of the suit, because they do not want to be revealed as people who are not worthy of their positions.
Eventually, the King is carried in a procession through the town, where everyone cries in wonder at the beauty of the suit they cannot see, until one child stands up, points at the King, and asks in a loud voice why the king is naked.

This, in my opinion, is the best fairy tale ever. I really could care less about knights and dragons, but the truth that is contained in this story could fill a book shelf.

Embedded in this tale of course is the general fear that people have about speaking the truth, even when it is perfectly obvious – but what is even more delightful, and terrifying, about this story is the complete absence of violence.

Everyone says that they can see the suit that is not there because of their own insecurities, their fear that they are not fit for their positions – but what society in history has ever been able to maintain a predatory hierarchy such as an aristocracy without the use of violence? For heaven’s sake, we cannot even maintain a parliamentary democracy without threatening everyone with a gun if they do not turn over half their income!

Openly identifying the violence at the root of mythological power was always and forever sheer suicide, throughout our entire evolutionary development as a species. Learning not to see what was blatantly obvious was foundational to surviving as an individual.

The amazing thing about the fairy tale above is that it describes how afraid people are to speak truth to power – and yet it itself re- mains afraid to speak truth to power, because it blames the fear of the people on the internal state of insecurity rather than the external threats of torture and beheading. It also shows the insecurity as radiating outward from the King – in other words, the people are insecure because the King is insecure. It is certainly true that no King can rationally feel that he deserves his position, but it is certainly not true that people were insecure because Kings were anxious and insecure, but rather because their Kings were sadistic and genocidal.

=== The Rational Fear Of Truth ===
Many of our desires and fears are hard-wired into our brains, down deep in the neurological cortex of our minds. Our sexual desires, our fight and flight mechanisms, our desire for water when we are thirsty, food when we are hungry, and rest when we are tired – this constellation of passions, needs, and emotions are not learned, but rather innate – babies do not learn to cry when they are hungry, but are born with that ability, as countless red-eyed parents can attest.

We have a natural aversion to that which is highly likely to bring about danger. Natural selection has done a wonderful job of picking those out of the gene pool who do things that get them killed.

The brutal power structures that dominated almost all of human history used endless violence to maintain their rule, but always had to at least provide the appearance that the violence was caused by the immorality – the “disobedience” – of the ruled. Throughout history, mock trials have been the norm, which drape the veneer of justice over what is, essentially, a Mafia hit.

The lies required to sustain the illusion that murder is virtue are virtually without number. The obvious irrationality of the rulers are recast as the “rationality” of gods. The obvious hypocritical double standards of power are “justified” according to the divine right of kings. Any citizens who attempt to break the chains that bind them are slaughtered wholesale, and then labelled “dangerous” to the other citizens – a mind-bending reversal of what is actually true! Societies wracked by dictatorships, wars, plagues, and famines are called “ordered,” while even the thought of a voluntary society not run by genocidal criminals is called “chaotic” and “anarchic.”

Since the dawn of our species, people have been endlessly slaughtered for speaking the simple truth about the violence of those in power. In addition, anyone who listened to such speeches – or was even in the same family, or in the same house – was also tortured and butchered.

Is it so shocking to think that the same instincts that compel us to run from a bear would also compel us to fear and shun those who speak the truth about power?

A bear can be out-run – thugs with clubs in the name of the King cannot.

Furthermore, those at the peak of the pyramid of bloody power always sent spies radiating out through the community, attempting to root out those who might be open to the truth about power. These oily beasts would curl up to peasants, speak subtle treason, and look for agreement. Any slave who hesitated to repel their words would be dragged into the street and dismembered.

Revolution was impossible; the truth was suicidal, and virtually everyone who whispered about the iniquity of power was a slaughtering spy.
When the truth about power enters into a conversation, Stone Age defences rise from the base of the brain, creating near pathological anxiety and hostility. In a moment, a civilised coffee shop becomes a fire-lit cave, and all the shiny pleasantries of modern democracy shatter before the emotional percussion of a falling club – revealed in the hands of the ruler only the moment before it lands on the skull of the foolish listener.

These associations are not conscious. This unbelievably rapid sequence of thought is imprinted below the awareness of the ego we know and love so well.

The greater the danger to life, the more automatic and unconscious the response to that danger needs to be. If you accidentally put your hand into a fire, your spine will detect the pain and jerk your hand back before the signals reach your brain.<ref>Biologically speaking, of course, your spine is only using you to make another spine, and so its self-interest makes perfect sense.</ref> If an unexpected noise reaches your ears while you are sleeping, your brain will yank you awake, your fight or flight adrenaline already pumping.

We are ringed by automatic sentinels that reason not from the reason of the present, but rather from the imminent deaths of history.

If you are not aware of the depth and power of the unconscious, then you will introduce the topic that taxation equals force with no understanding whatsoever of the degree of stress, anxiety, and hostility that your words evoke in others.

The person that you are talking to will probably not have any greater understanding of what is happening to them than you do. The hostility that they feel will arise in them as if out of nowhere.

It is a well-recognised psychological phenomenon that most people will almost automatically and immediately invent conceptual reasons for unexpected emotional distress. First comes the shock, or the fear, or the anger – and then comes the “explanation,” after the fact. Almost everyone reasons ex post facto, in reaction to unexpected emotional distress. Almost every argument you will ever hear is a form of emotional self-management, designed to keep the real truth at bay – not from you, but rather from the person who is arguing.

When someone hears that taxation is force, their unconscious hears all of the implications contained in that statement immediately, at light speed, and leaps into action to protect them from being tortured and killed.

The unconscious does not have a calendar. The unconscious has never heard of the Bill of Rights, or free speech.

The unconscious is a fierce guardian, blind to time.

This aspect of our unconscious developed in a time when we saw people who spoke the truth – or listened to the truth – slaughtered on a whim.
Those people who with open and snowy innocence spoke the truth as it occurred to them fill half the unnamed pits of our genocidal history. They did not survive to pass their mutations along.

Those who feared the truth, and feared those who spoke the truth, did survive – to teach their children to fear and shun the truth, and to see those children who did not, taken and murdered.

We are still so early in the development of our species that the world is not run by truth, or reason, but by the unconscious, by the blind and beautiful pit-bull of history that will kill and die to save its master.

=== Anger In The Face Of Truth ===
When you speak the truth to someone – let us call him Meletus – he experiences a sudden stab of fear and irritation. He does not want to be in this conversation, but he also cannot leave it, because in the past – our collective past – that would have indicated guilt. You have put Meletus in a difficult situation, and he resents you for it.

Meletus does not believe that he is a slave, for to believe that he is a slave would be to consciously understand the true nature of political power, which is the threat of overwhelming force against the legally disarmed.

Asking Meletus to admit that he is a slave, and to accept the argument that taxation equals force is true, is the direct equivalent, to his unconscious at least, of attempting to throw him into a tank full of sharks.

Historically, slaves were never allowed to point out the violence of their rulers, or to consider themselves slaves at all, since that was just another way of pointing out such violence. Thus Meletus must make up justifications for his rulers because he is frightened of the truth of their violence – because throughout history accepting or speaking that truth got people killed.

Thus, you provoke anxiety in Meletus – anxiety that he cannot consciously admit to himself, since that leads down the path to real physical danger. You have also provoked a feeling of humiliation in him, by creating fear and anxiety within him that he has to avoid.

=== Levelling ===
Most adults, when they experience humiliation, attempt to “level up,” by creating an impression of false superiority. Since Meletus feels “put down” relative to you, he will strive to put you down in return, to restore his feeling of “self-esteem.”<ref>For more on this, see just about any Doctor Phil show you can find.</ref>

How many times do libertarians experience condescension from those they bring the “TEF” argument to?

How often have libertarians been portrayed – in word or in deed – as naive, oddly resentful, out of touch, or as pointless mavericks, hopeless theorisers, and ungrateful citizens?

How many times do libertarians have to be lectured to about the “social contract,” and the “free-market of democracy,” and the “right to leave if you do not approve,” and so on?

How many times do libertarians have to see their arguments against violence re-framed as arguments against voluntarism?

How many times do libertarians have to see their arguments for voluntarism re-framed as arguments for violence?

Apparently, that number, in the absence of psychological understanding, appears to be functionally infinite.

=== The Fear Of Others ===
Deep down, everybody knows that what is called “society” is little more than a series of violent mythologies designed to keep the powers that be aloft.

Biologically, people are designed for conformity with the group rather than integrity to the truth, since conformity encouraged survival, and integrity mostly got you killed.

When you ask someone to admit the violence and mythology of what they call “morality,” it is not the rulers who primarily make them afraid, but rather it is their peer social group – their friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, and family.

I say this based on twenty-five years of experience – I am sure you have had exactly the same experience – which is that I have been arguing for voluntarism and freedom for decades, and have never once been attacked, sanctioned, or even goosed by state agents.

No, it is always and forever only my fellow citizens who attack the truth – who attack me, rather, since the truth cannot be “attacked,” but only accepted or disproved.

When I posed a series of rational and empirical questions and criticisms of the efficacy of the Ron Paul campaign, I was not audited by the IRS or cornered by men in black. Rather, it was the libertarian community and the Ron Paul supporters who turned against me.

Everyone knows that when you begin to question the philosophical and moral assumptions – often unconscious, to be sure, but even more dangerous because of that – of your peer social group, they will turn on you most savagely.

Every Christian knows that if they begin to persistently question the existence of God, they will be rapidly ejected from their supposedly loving peer group. And they also know, deep down, that they will be ejected not because they are wrong, but rather because they are right. Meletus decided to attack Socrates, rather than any of the other thousands of Sophists infesting the culture of ancient Greece – because Socrates was right – not necessarily in all his conclusions, since no one achieves that, but rather in his fluid, empirical, and rational methodology for approaching the truth.

Everyone knows that what they consider necessary conformity is actually just enslavement to error.

Everyone knows that it is not the state that keeps us in chains; we keep each other in chains. The state merely profits from our willingness – eagerness even – to attack each other.

It is far cheaper to keep slaves when the slaves eagerly police themselves.

Religion is fundamentally not a belief in an invisible God, but the fear of attack by the peer group.

Statism is fundamentally not the belief that the government is virtuous, but the fear of attack by the peer group if one dares to say otherwise.
Libertarianism is fundamentally not the belief that political action, religious affiliation, and academic education will bring freedom, but rather the fear of attack by the libertarian peer group if one dares to question these axioms.

== On A Personal Note ==
I came relatively late in life to the libertarian movement – I had nothing to do with it until my late thirties, less than three years ago.

Like most people who come to a new movement which seems compatible with many values they already hold, I took what libertarians said mostly at face value. When they talked of their genuine desires to free the world from statism, I thought: excellent! When their articles exploded many of the mythologies I had long suspected as false (“Lincoln freed the slaves!”), I was thrilled! I dug deep into libertarian literature with great excitement and optimism.

I suppose it was because I brought other, more disciplined and empirical skills and experiences to the table – my entrepreneurial endeavours in a variety of fields – that I slowly began to become uncomfortable with the libertarian habit of making baseless claims, and then becoming resentful when asked for evidence.

I had seen enough sleazy salesmen in the business world to know a con when I saw one.

In my mind, I began to divide the libertarian world into the “end of the world nut jobs” and the more rational empiricists. I placed most of the religious libertarians into the former category, but reserved places of honour within my mind for the various scholars and activists who seemed more rational.

I accepted the fact that a few of my early articles were edited to remove any content that may be conceivably offensive to religious sentiments. These articles were not about religion, and so I did not mind particularly that a few sentences or paragraphs were struck out before publication.

As I began to pod-cast, very early on I discussed the empirical and rational arguments against the existence of gods. The fact that my articles were still accepted within the libertarian community despite my outright, vocal, and strong atheism, gave me some comfort that religion was not a core topic for libertarianism.

However, when I began to talk about psychological motives, personal history, and the effect of early childhood experiences on later thoughts and feelings, I began to feel a certain chill shiver through the libertarian community.

Rumours began to spread that Freedomain Radio was some sort of cult, which “commanded” people to leave their families – despite the fact that of the roughly fifty thousand people who have listened to the show, about twenty have separated from abusive families.

I was also called “dictatorial” for asking abusive or aggressive people to stop posting on the FDR forum – about thirty in over two years, or less than one percent of the total membership – pretty good for a forum which deals with such volatile topics!

I have also been accused of “driving” the conversation in particular directions, in other words, towards psychological and relationship issues - which is a truly astounding claim, coming as it does from those who claim a deep understanding of the free market!

For those who do not seem able to grasp how the free market really works, I will provide a brief explanation.

I do not have the capacity to “drive” the conversation. I did deal with some family and psychological issues, starting at about pod-cast seventy – but if people were not interested in those theories, the topic would have been entirely dropped! I also did pod-casts on Shakespeare, which proved to be fairly uninteresting to the vast majority of my listeners, so that topic has not come up again.

The same libertarians who endlessly argue that it is impossible for a corporation to impose its will upon consumers in the free-market, and impossible to gain a dictatorial monopoly – also say that I somehow “control” and “dominate” my customers.<ref>It is interesting to me that not one of these criticisms has ever come from entrepreneurs who have actually worked in the free-market, but rather only from religious, political, and academic types – for fairly obvious reasons.</ref>

The simple fact is that I follow and talk about what my listeners are most interested in – just like any other entrepreneur. Every Sunday afternoon I ask my listeners what is uppermost in their mind. For at least eighteen months, I can scarcely think of a single topic that has been philosophical or economic in nature. Empirically, objectively, people want to talk about personal ethics, immediate relationships, and the deep struggle we all face to live with integrity in our own lives.

I do not interrupt listeners who are asking about economics and “order” them to talk about highly personal issues – as if that were even possible! Like any good entrepreneur, I let my customers drive the provision of services.

If I did not, there would be no show.

I once talked to a libertarian radio talk show host who tried to do a three-day series on personal relationships, only to have to abandon it after less than two days, due to listener indifference and outright hostility. As a listener wrote: “I listen to your show to find out what’s wrong with the government, not for dating advice!”

That is the awesome power we show hosts wield!

One of the most popular segments in Freedomain Radio was “Ask A Therapist,” where my wife answered questions about personal relationships and mental health. Those who call in to the Sunday show almost exclusively ask questions about personal relationships and mental health. When a listener contacts me for a conversation, it is almost always about personal relationships and mental health.

These are just the facts of market demand – and it is entirely ridiculous that so-called free-market “experts” believe that I can somehow magically control my customers. For the sake of all that is rational, I run a charity, and so am far more dependent on the kindness of strangers than most organisations that provide fee-based products or services!

It is also an astounding monument to hypocrisy that I have been accused of “controlling” my donators by atheist libertarians who refuse to challenge religious libertarians! If I am not dependent upon the voluntary goodwill of my donators, but can somehow magically control them, then why are libertarians so afraid to confront religious donators? Why is it that libertarianism has to endlessly appease its religious supporters, but I am somehow in total control over my donators?

Welcome to the wonderful world of psychological projection!

=== Psychology An Me ===
I have been fascinated by psychology since I was in my teens; in my early thirties I went through a few years of very intensive psychotherapy, which I found immensely positive – my wife practices psychology, and runs her own clinic, and was – to her eternal credit – the one who began pushing me towards a psychological understanding of the potentials and challenges of the freedom movement.

I did not at first understand why libertarians – who claim that empirical and rational social sciences such as economics are perfectly valid – would be so hostile towards an empirical and rational social science such as psychology. In my own naivety, I assumed that this was largely because of a lack of understanding of psychology, rather than any innate hostility towards it.

Through my show, I continued to explain the basic tenets of psychology, and participated in a number of listener conversations where I think the value of psychological understanding and deep self-knowledge was more than amply demonstrated. Through Freedomain Radio, people got out of bad relationships, and often into good relationships – they liberated themselves from unproductive and dead-end careers, and revitalised their own work environments. People achieved real freedom in their lives by leaving salaried employment and starting their own companies – and this resulted not from economic explication, but rather a psychological investigation of their own resistance to freedom, which often brought them up against the limitations of their personal relationships.

It was during this phase of Freedomain Radio that I began to hear the first mutterings and accusations that I was running some sort of cult. Several people who were participating on the Freedomain Radio board became volatile and destructive – after attempting to negotiate with them in the hopes of achieving more rational and positive behaviours, I realise that this would be impossible, and I banned them.

Although some people experience my banning of abusive and destructive people with dismay, it is perfectly consistent with my approach to relationships, which is that you try to negotiate and get what you want out of people – and offer them the same opportunity – but if you are unable to come to an agreement on mutually beneficial behaviour, you are in no way obligated to continue the relationship.

I do not view this as an entirely subjective process, of course, since I believe that verbal abuse, name-calling, and passive aggressive provocations, for instance, are not negotiable.

If I host a weekly dinner party, where anyone can drop by, I do have the right to ban people who disrupt the productivity and pleasure of the conversation through verbal abuse.

It is my house after all, and it is testament to the psychological distress of certain libertarians that they rail against my exercise of property rights, while claiming property rights to be a sacrosanct value.

The issue of the Ron Paul candidacy arose shortly after this time. Even before I knew that Ron Paul was a fundamentalist Christian, I criticised political action as merely the illusion of progress, and the draining of resources that could be used more productively elsewhere.

Most libertarians placed enormous hopes in the Ron Paul candidacy, and doubtless experienced my questions, criticisms, and empirical tests for success as irritating, if not enraging – certainly the comments that I received on my videos were spectacularly hostile, and if I had run my private emails through a profanity filter, I would have largely been looking at near-endless rows of asterisks.

I simply could not understand why money was being hurled at a “solution” without any hint of a project plan, testable milestones, and empirical verification of claims – probably as a result of my free-market experience as an entrepreneur, in both the software and artistic fields. The fact that libertarians were wildly enthusiastic about burning through tens of millions of dollars – not to mention countless hours – without once seeming to consider how else these resources could be used – struck me as more of a collective stampede off the cliff of delusion than a rational and disciplined approach to the effective allocation of time and money.

I began to get more suspicious when I saw the “dual-answer” approach to potential donators – those who were concerned with winning were told that Ron Paul could win, while those who were sceptical of that possibility were told that Ron Paul was “educating people.”
Again, I had seen enough of this nonsense in the entrepreneurial world, and spotted these manipulations pretty quickly.

Then, I saw exhortations to donate to the Ron Paul campaign – with mad claims that he could still win – when it had become, for all intents and purposes, impossible for him to do so.

To me, this began to look very close to outright fraud.

As I examined the good Doctor’s candidacy, I began to really see the seedy Christian underbelly of the libertarian movement: Ron Paul’s rejection of evolution – from a man well-trained in the scientific method, and so unable to claim backwoods ignorance – along with the crassly exploitive money-grubbing, hostility to rational questions about the efficacy of this candidacy, an increased and almost hysterical pandering to Christians (for the sake of donations of course), and a general abandonment of restraint, reason, evidence, and plain common sense.

Principles were hurled overboard like heavy crates from a sinking ship – the collective hysteria of “now or never” gripped people in its feverish fist, creating volatile and hostile “us versus them” aggression and paranoia. “If you are against Ron Paul, you are against freedom!” – a chilling echo of Bush’s “He who is not with us is against us” – showed just how far down the well of superstitious collectivism the movement had plummeted.

Those few of us who resisted the pressures of these aggressive delusions were soundly and repetitively attacked for raising rational questions during a time of general hysteria – and after the hysteria had begun to subside, we were not praised – or even recognised – for predicting the futility of the campaign in advance. Instead, ex post facto justifications were invented about the value of educating people through the campaign – again, with little to no empirical evidence.

You could also see the gruesomely irrational spectacle of Ron Paul openly saying on the Colbert Report after he lost so spectacularly that he never had any chance at all – while on the very same show, a few months earlier, he had said that there was a reasonable chance that he just might win.

Of course, this is the kind of ridiculous reversal common to those unable to admit their own corruption. If you say after you have lost spectacularly, that you really thought you could win, then you look kind of deranged, and largely out of touch with reality. If a man claims to genuinely believe that he can win Olympic gold in long-distance running, but cannot even struggle around the track once, clearly he is delusional about his own abilities. Thus it is inevitable that Ron Paul would reverse his estimation of his own chances after his spectacular failure – and without any reference to his prior “optimism” – because Ron Paul is a politician, just like every other politician. He goes to Washington and gets money for his constituents; he says whatever he needs to say to maximise his “credibility” and income in the moment, and he makes wild claims while steadfastly rejecting empirical evidence.

How could it be otherwise? He is a fundamentalist Christian.

As the success of Freedomain Radio continued to grow, I was for quite a while rather surprised at the general indifference – and outright hostility – of the libertarian community towards the show. Given that libertarianism is supposed to be all about voluntarism, surely the voluntary nature of the show would meet with their approval. Surely, given that libertarians are constantly claiming that the poor will be educated in a free society, Freedomain Radio would be a wonderful example of just that – since I give everything away for free, and rely on voluntary donations, those who cannot afford to pay for instruction can still receive it.

Surely, since the Ron Paul supporters were so devoted to educating people about liberty, after the failure of the Ron Paul candidacy, they would at least acknowledge the value of a show that continues to grow and spread arguments for freedom!

When a voluntary organisation educates tens of thousands of people without charging a penny, surely that is a wonderful example of the benevolent free market in action. In my rather deluded optimism, I pictured at least some excitement within the libertarian community about this radical application of free-market ideals, innovative use of technology, and pursuit of a highly unusual business plan. I imagined that people would be curious about the success of Freedomain Radio, and cite it as an example of the power and benevolence of voluntarism, as well as a practical example of how people can be educated who cannot afford it.

It's not like I am some entirely non-credible fringe nut – I studied English literature, economics, and psychology at the undergraduate level, and hold a Masters degree in History from an Ivy League university. I got an ‘A’ on my thesis on intellectual history, based on primary sources on Plato, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. I have been a successful entrepreneur who co-founded and sold a fairly large company, and I have also written and directed a successful play for the theatre. I have lived in England, South Africa, and Canada, and travelled throughout North America, Europe, and China for business.

As the success of the show continued to grow, and the number of pod-cast downloads started to run into the millions, the indifference and hostility of the libertarian movement as a whole started to become truly incomprehensible to me, and I decided to sit down and try to figure out what the implications were of this avoidance.

I am very glad that I did this, because I learned an enormous amount about the movement whose goals I care for very, very deeply.

This book does not result from my hostility towards libertarianism, but rather from my love of freedom, and my desire to build a rational and empirical plan to achieve it.

We cannot go through the church to achieve a free society, because on the other side of the church is always a graveyard.

For those with the eyes to see, religion is a spent force fundamentally, surviving only on the fading momentum of the past. The younger generation is far more intelligent and sceptical than we ever were, and no movement can succeed in gaining their allegiance that abases itself before the superstitions of their elders.

== Rational Libertarians ==
There are many noble and brilliant libertarians within the movement, who respect empirical evidence and reasoned arguments, who reject the existence of God – and even the validity of political action – but in general they remain “secret doubters,” who are afraid to speak their minds for fear of attack or rejection, or perhaps from a misguided belief that “infighting” is bad.

This has always struck me as a rather odd perspective for lovers of liberty to possess.

Surely, freedom is first and foremost the freedom to speak one’s mind openly and honestly, with reason and evidence as your guide. If we self-censor within the freedom movement because we are afraid of disapproval, attack, or the appearance of discord, then surely we are missing something essential and elemental about the concept of freedom.<ref>This reminds me of a prominent libertarian I met once who had unbelievably bad breath -- as my wife pointed out, it seemed odd that in a movement devoted to freedom, nobody felt free to point out this basic fact.</ref>

Either libertarianism is a rational and empirical social science, or it is a cult devoted to grabbing money from the superstitious.
If libertarianism is a rational and empirical social science – as I believe it is – then it is time to clean house.

This means ditching religious money, and the easy and sleazy money-grubbing of promising political solutions to political problems.
It also means a basic recognition of the reality that using the statist protection of academia to teach people about the free market is worse than useless – it actively discredits the values it claims to promote.

Libertarianism recognises that the state is corrupt because its proclaimed values are always undermined by special interest groups, who trumpet their high motives while grabbing cash from the public purse.

The fact that lofty ideals are so susceptible to base financial self-interest is a central libertarian criticism of the state – and rightly so!
Since the state exists as an idealistic cover for base money-grubbing, to overturn state power, libertarians must inevitably accept that people are capable of overcoming their immediate financial incentives for the sake of pursuing and achieving a higher moral goal.

Libertarians will say to highly-subsidised farmers that those farmers should be willing and able to give up their funding – and take the short-term financial hit – for the sake of a better world in the future.

Fundamentally, the power of the state cannot be broken if people cannot be convinced to place moral ideals above immediate financial gain. If people are not willing to suffer through the transition from a statist society to a free society – with all the immediate financial losses that will occur for literally tens of millions of people – then the power of the state will never be broken – or even limited – but rather will endlessly increase to the point of collapse, whereupon it will start all over again.

If libertarians are not able to put their own high moral ideals above their immediate financial gain, they have zero moral right to demand or expect this from others. How can a libertarian tell a farmer that they should live without state subsidies, and take the short-term financial losses for the sake of a better world, when libertarians themselves are completely hostile to the idea that they should live without Christian subsidies, and state protection, and take the short-term financial losses for the sake of a better world?

Well, you might say, but state money is taken at the point of a gun, while Christian money is voluntary.

There is some truth in this, but there is much more falsehood.

Christianity – like any cult or superstition – has only survived for thousands of years because it indoctrinates helpless and dependent children, frightening them with tales of eternal vigilance from sky ghosts, eternal punishments for mere thought, the innate evil of original sin, the need to beg for forgiveness for the sin of breathing – and all other varieties of mental tortures that children are utterly unable to evade or resist, as a result of their dependent status.

Libertarians endlessly rail against the pro-state propaganda of public schools, bewailing the fact that children have false ideals inflicted upon them against their will.<ref>Harry Browne said that if there was only one thing he could change about statism, it would be the privatisation of public schools, since their propaganda was the greatest barrier to the spread of libertarianism.</ref>

However, they call Christian money purely voluntary, as if children do not have the false ideas of religious superstition inflicted upon them against their will.

If you doubt that religion is a virus passed down through intergenerational propaganda, all you have to do is imagine the odds that a child raised in a remote Afghanistan village by Muslim parents, with no exposure to Christian tenets whatsoever, will end up as a note-perfect Baptist. What about a child tossed ashore from a shipwreck on a desert island? With no exposure to religious teachings whatsoever, is it likely that they will end up as an Orthodox Jew, and grow their sideburns into corkscrew curls?

Of course not.

We can debate whether or not the religious impulse is innate to the human soul – but the specific forms of religiosity are certainly not, as is evidenced by their variety and localised reproduction around the world.

Religion is the scar tissue of abusive childhood indoctrination and terrorising – to say that the money that abused children pay to avoid the reactivation of the guilt and fear that was imprinted upon them as helpless dependants is purely voluntary – well, that is to continue the exploitation of those children, by reinforcing the propaganda they will doubtless inflict upon their own children in turn.

Religious indoctrination is child abuse; the “charity” that religious organisations collect as a result of this indoctrination can scarcely be called benevolent voluntarism.

We fully recognise that a child who was raised in Stalinist Russia did not “choose” to become a communist – as they doubtless did – but rather we would be sympathetic towards them, as the victim of vicious and authoritarian propaganda.

There is functionally no difference between statist propaganda and religious propaganda – the first is inflicted through the impersonal power of the state; the second is inflicted through the personal power of the parents.

=== The Company One Keeps ===
It is a fair truism to say that a person is judged by the company they keep. When a radical, frightening, and unprecedented idea arises in the intellectual landscape, most people will immediately look for cracks, inconsistencies, hypocrisies, like water attempting to find its way through a wall.

The more unusual the claims, the higher the standard of integrity needs to be. Most of the central tenets of libertarianism are unusual, frightening, and unsettling to the vast majority of people – as a result, those people will look for any excuse to reject libertarianism as a whole.

There is no shortage of nutty ideas in the world, and most of us feel very comfortable rejecting, say, the basic beliefs of those crazed and broken souls who cut their own testicles off and killed themselves in order to merge with some comet shooting through the sky, and ride off to heaven in a blaze of flowing light.

Similarly, with regards to Scientology, I am comfortable dismissing the philosophy – such as it is – as a whole, once I understand that the thesis rests to some degree on the premise that mankind arose from lizard men crashing to Earth several million years ago.

If you are a competent mathematician, and you are handed a one hundred page proof, and you find a massive error on the first page – some-thing along the lines of “3 plus blue equals unicorn” – do you really consider it necessary to grind your way through the remaining ninety-nine pages in order to discover and elucidate every single error?

Of course not.

Life is short – which is why a woman looking for a gentleman does not go on a second date with a man who brings her to a strip club.

The requirements for integrity and rationality rise in proportion to the newness and scariness of the ideas being presented. Old ideas gain a kind of mossy momentum, and just seem true to people who grew up with them, no matter how nutty they are in reality – this of course is the basis of conservatism.

If I put out a pod-cast claiming that my neighbour can walk on water, bring people back from the dead, was born of a virgin, and can heal blindness by touching eyelids, people would assume that I was either joking or insane – but add two thousand years and a bunch of funny hats to the equation, and suddenly it all seems perfectly reasonable.

This is another reason why libertarianism’s association with Christianity has turned the movement into a shallow, ineffectual, and greedy joke.
When someone is exposed to a new idea, they generally do not delve deeply into its internal consistency, but first and foremost look at the company it keeps. If someone claims to be able to read minds, but is confined to an insane asylum, surrounded by people who believe they are Napoleon, or can fly, or are Jesus – are you likely to spend time, effort, and money validating their claim?

Add to this scenario the fact that the “mind reader” vehemently denies that they are in an insane asylum, and no one will take their claim seriously at all.

In an increasingly secular society, when someone comes across libertarian claims, the first thing that they often do is look at the company that libertarians keep.

If they find that libertarians hold in great esteem and high regard those who reject the theory of evolution, believe that people can come back from the dead, that virgins can give birth, and that the world was created in six days by some invisible being – and crawl all over each other in a mad stampede to take money from such deluded fools – then they will inevitably be drawn to the rather intelligent conclusion that the standards of proof, evidence, and rationality within the libertarian movement are not particularly high, to put it mildly.

Either they are going to come across libertarians who believe all of this superstitious nonsense – in which case, how are they going to take anything libertarians preach seriously? – or they are going to come across those who hold libertarian beliefs, and who are atheists.

In this case, their interest may actually be piqued – which methodology, they wonder, will win this battle? Will it be the rational empiricism of the atheists, or the delusional superstitions of the theists?

Ah, sadly, almost at once they will find that the atheists claim to hold the theists in high regard, and praise the superstitious for their devotion to truth and virtue!

This will all seem to be far too complex and ridiculous a riddle to even bother trying to unravel – how on earth can rational empiricists proffer such rank praise to the superstitious?

If they decide to spend another few minutes thinking about libertarianism, they will undoubtedly conclude that the majority of its funding comes from religious organisations – and a moment’s research will confirm this fact.<ref>For instance, you can have a look here; most of the donating organisations are financial supporters of organised religion: http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=51 http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=1174</ref>

“Ah,” they will say, “so these supposed ‘rationalists’ have just sold out to the highest bidder, which in this case happens to be the Christians.”

They will understand that, like any politician or cowed employee, libertarians of all kinds are simply bowing to those who pay the bills.

Not only will such a potential convert to libertarianism roll their eyes in the face of such pompous hypocrisy, but they will also understand that integrity to the truth is completely optional for libertarians – and in fact, if they spend even a few additional minutes researching the subject, and find out that there appears to be no self-criticism within the movement at all of this bottomless betrayal of reason and evidence – then they will quickly understand that the subjugation of reason to religion is not a topic that these heroic libertarians feel safe even discussing.

After this sad journey into pathetic compromise and self abasement before the deep pockets of deep prejudice, will our potential friend view libertarian theories as a whole as trustworthy? If libertarians slavishly praise – for mere money, no less – religious bigotry and rank irrationality, will they assume that their theories will be monuments to the highest and most challenging forms of integrity?

Of course not.

They will understand that libertarians as a whole are actually more corrupt than the religious – because the religious at least do not praise the abstract principles of reason and evidence, but rather worship the whims of faith.

It is one thing for a witch doctor to do a rain dance; it is quite another for a climatologist to do a rain dance. The witch doctor at least does not claim to respect the scientific method, and has not been trained in rational empiricism.

We would not trust a supposedly-rational climatologist who did a rain dance because a witch doctor offered them a few beads – in the same way, the average citizen will recoil from the hypocrisy of libertarianism, recognising that it is a ridiculously self-contradictory discipline that praises science and superstition equally, but always defers to superstition.

Those with the stomach to dig a little deeper into the movement will wonder how those who claim that government power always leads to evil deal with the complex problems of living within a statist society. As soon as they see how many academic professors there are in the libertarian movement, I am sure that they will be intrigued as to how this contradiction is dealt with.

“Wow, these people claim that state power is evil, and always leads to evil – yet they live lives almost entirely subsidised and protected by the state – what ingenious arguments have they devised to justify this astounding contradiction?”

Sadly, they will find no ingenious arguments, merely sniggering assertions that it is a wonderful thing to use state power to teach libertarian concepts – in other words, that evil can be used to do good!

“But that is amazing!” our friend will think. “Is it not the case that everyone who uses state power believes that he or she is able to use this awesome violence to create good? Do not those who run the welfare state genuinely accept that while charity would be preferable, it is regrettably necessary, given the current circumstances, to use state power to help the poor? Do not those who run the war on drugs genuinely believe that while a voluntarily drug-free society would be preferable, it is regrettably necessary, given the current circumstances, to use state power to prevent drug use?”

The list would go on and on within their mind – the endless, woeful litany of those who condemn the use of violence in the hands of others, but believe that in their hands, such violence can be turned to the service of virtue!

=== A Universal Contradiction? ===
I would like to briefly address the criticism that is sometimes levelled at me with regards to profiting from state power, which is that in my entrepreneurial career, there were times when I competed for and won sales contracts with government agencies, and cashed those checks, which contributed to my own income.

This of course is a perfectly fair question, and I would like to do what I can to address it.

First of all, it is impossible to live within a modern statist society and not do business – either directly, or indirectly – with the government. Even if I had avoided government contracts, I would have ended up doing business with private companies that do a lot of business with the government, and would have received the same “blood money,” except with a middleman.

Secondly, at no point that I can recall was the income from government agencies more than ten percent of total revenues. In fact, towards the end of my tenure as a Chief Technical Officer, we began to move away from government contracts, because they were rarely as profitable as private contracts.

Thirdly, we as a corporation were taxed at a very heavy level, and I do not think that recovering money that is taken by force is a particularly egregious moral problem. For instance, I also wrote up, submitted, and defended tax credits that we were entitled to under Canadian law for doing original research and development in the software field. I was perfectly happy to get that money back, and used it to expand the company.
Fourthly, during the time that I was occasionally pursuing and winning government contracts, I was not a public advocate of the value and virtue of a purely free-market. I was not at the time even an anarchist – I was a typical Objectivist minarchist, in that I believed the government was required for the military, the law courts, and the prison system. In the ideal society that I believed in at the time, there would still be government contracts that would still need to be pursued and won through free-market competition. I no longer hold these beliefs, and it was not particularly long after I became a fully fledged anarchist that I left the business world completely, and set up a purely voluntary, ultimate free-market business called Freedomain Radio, which relies on no government contracts, gets no special government tax breaks, and receives of course no government subsidies of any kind – or even offers tax receipts for charitable donations. I cannot imagine a more voluntary business than the one I am running now, which is about as consistent with my values as I can conceivably get without building a time machine and vaulting forward two hundred years into Libertopia.

Fifthly – and I think most importantly – I strongly believe that there is an enormous difference between competing for a government contract on the free and open market – without state protection or direct subsidisation of any kind – and joining a state protected and state enforced union which violently prevents competition, subsidies about ninety percent of your salary, and will throw anyone in jail who dares to fire you.
For me, this is the difference between working for Federal Express, and occasionally delivering government packages – and voluntarily pursuing, grabbing on to, and holding at all costs a senior position in the Post Office union.

Conflating these opposing approaches to the challenges of living within a statist society makes a mockery of both intent and integrity.

== Empiricism And This Book ==

== We Can Only Hope We Are Screwing Up ==

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:16:51Z

Anarchei: /* On A Personal Note */

{{header
| title = [[Achieving Freedom]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2008
| section = Root Causes
| previous = [[Achieving Freedom/1|How (Not) To Achieve Freedom]]
| next =
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== The Effects Of Ethics ==
A deep understanding of the non-aggression principle (NAP) creates a significant moral divide, with those who initiate the use of force on one side, and those who reject the initiation of the use of force on the other.<ref>For more on this, please have a look at my book on Universally Preferable Behaviour, available for free on my website.</ref>

Those who initiate the use of force can rationally be called evil, while those who actively support the initiation of the use of force – who justify it morally – can be called corrupt.

It is also reasonable to accept that someone cannot be responsible for knowledge they do not yet possess. We can easily understand that while a modern doctor who does not prescribe antibiotics for a virulent infection is grossly negligent, a medieval doctor who had no access to antibiotics cannot be held to the same standard.

Between these two extremes lies a kind of “grey area.” When antibiotics were first being introduced and tested, it would have been irresponsible for a doctor to prescribe them for every conceivable ailment (as remains the case today) – however, after a certain amount of testing and verification had been completed, the balance tipped towards prescription.

Someone who has never heard the argument that taxation is force cannot be morally condemned for their ignorance. A baby is not “uneducated” – rather they are in a state of “pre-education.” I do not know Mandarin – this does not make me a fool, or ignorant in general, but rather it is merely the case that I lack the knowledge to speak Mandarin.

The same is true in terms of moral knowledge. I only came to a deep understanding and a consistent theoretical application of the NAP in my philosophy in my thirties – close to twenty years after I began to study philosophy. This does not mean that I was morally corrupt or evil in my twenties, but rather that I was in the pursuit of knowledge that I had not attained as yet. I did not have exposure to some of the more consistent moral arguments in favour of a stateless society, although I must confess that I did on occasion feel a certain amount of unease with the Objectivist approach to certain issues, particularly in terms of ethics.

It was through an acceptance of this unease that I began to develop more original approaches to the issues I found lacking in other philosophies. I certainly make no claim to originality in all these areas, all that I can say for sure is that these ideas were new to me, whether they were new to the world is not something I can really speak to, since I prefer the generation of new ideas to the comparison of those ideas with every other school of thought.

Someone cannot be considered immoral for failing to understand that taxation is force – the crux of the issue arises when they are first exposed to the argument that taxation is force.

This argument is emotionally trying. The fundamental alienation that spreads in the soul of a person who begins to understand that taxation is force is hard to bear.

When a powerful and foundational moral argument is introduced to a person in adulthood, the emotional recoil that they experience is really based upon what has been missing from the moral discourse of their society.

=== The Libertarian Division ===
Libertarians of all kinds are constantly making the basic moral argument that taxation is force, and that the government is a violent institution. As moral theories go, that this is not exactly quantum physics. Problems such as abortion, “lifeboat scenarios,” homesteading, capital punishment, and so on are all highly challenging and controversial – the fact that we pay taxes because we are threatened with jail is not.

Why, then, is this basic fact still so endlessly denied, evaded, fogged, and rejected within society?

One of the central problems with pursuing an illusory solution to a genuine challenge – religion, academia, political action – is that it avoids the necessity of elemental self-criticism.

In the business world, this process is called a post mortem, or a strict and stringent review of even a successful project, to create a list of “lessons learned,” and so pursue a program of continuous improvement. Unsuccessful projects are analysed in great detail, and improved practices are put into place to help avoid such catastrophes in the future.

Coming from the business entrepreneurial world, it is truly shocking to me to see the degree to which libertarians avoid performing any kind of post mortems on their projects. The same is true of academics and priests, of course.

The most astounding statements are made with no empirical evidence whatsoever – “Ron Paul can win!” “Educating the public will bring about political freedom!” “Religious beliefs are an essential component of human liberty!”

Even statements made in private, to me personally, are wild assertions – again, with no empirical evidence or reasoning whatsoever. I have been told that libertarians dare not speak about their atheism openly, for fear of alienating Christian supporters – on the assumption that such an alienation would be disastrous for the freedom movement. But how is this known for sure? What logical reasoning or empirical evidence is brought to bear on this assumption?

When I was a young man, I attended the National Theatre School in Montreal, Canada for two years, studying playwriting and acting. I had the juicy role of Cornwall in King Lear, and I vividly remember one rehearsal where we evil characters got news of a disaster. As dedicated method actors, we all turned our attention inwards, and thought about dead kittens and sad films. The director stared at us with shock, horror, and anger. “How the hell am I supposed to know that you have just received the worst news of your lives?”

I tried to explain to him – and how earnest I was – that if I change my inward thinking, it will communicate itself to the audience in some magical and unconscious manner.

His lip curled in scorn, and he asked, “So let us say that I have paid twenty dollars to come and see this play, and I am in row two hundred in the theatre, how is it that I’m supposed to psychically commune with you to understand that your slightly drooping mouth indicates some sort of inner horror?”

All of us actors resisted this crass and coarse showmanship, preferring to imagine that some movie camera was virtually up our noses, and could catch the slightest change in our facial expressions. The next time we rehearsed the scene, again, we went inwards and summoned up visions of bad news in our distant histories. The director leapt up, grabbed the chair that he was sitting on, and threw it across the stage.

He whirled to us, and said: “Do any of you not understand that I am pissed off right now? If you were in row two hundred, would you still be able to somehow figure out that I am pissed off? I don’t care if you do cartwheels or start juggling, just do something when you hear, as these characters, the worst news of your entire fucking lives!”

Strangely enough, this advice followed me very productively into the business world. Whenever a disaster occurred – and troubles come not as single spies, but in battalions, in the entrepreneurial world – I would sometimes hear in my ear this director’s commandment that when something bad occurs, the important thing is to do something – in a way, it does not even really matter what, because anything is better than standing and staring.
I suppose that I have brought some of this energy to the libertarian world, and constantly feel surprised – which itself is telling – that an intensely pro-business movement so studiously avoids criticism and the exploration of alternatives in the face of disaster.

It took me quite some time to really begin to understand what is going on in the world of libertarianism that inevitably produces this avoidance. I resisted for quite a long time the inevitable conclusions – the analysis that I talk about in this book – but then I basically thought:

“Okay, let us say that I the Chief Operating Officer at a big company, and I have a division called Libertarianism. This division has been making claims for decades about its ability to increase the size of its market share, to the point where it actually has a dominant majority in the market. However, when I look at the actual performance results of this division, I see that the market – government power – has actually gotten massively larger, while the market share – libertarian votes – has actually shrunk to near insignificance, relative to government power.
“This Libertarian division has been sort of a pet project of a doddering CEO (his name is Christian, of course) for quite some time, and it has not been subjected to any of the rigours and disciplines of the free market, because it has received funding from Christian regardless of whether it even remotely achieves its goals. As the COO, I cannot overturn the decisions of the CEO.

“This Division is full of very, very smart people, with doctorates and masters, all sorts of connections and amazing writing abilities, and rich experience in marketing and advertising – so it is not a lack of intelligence or ability that has made this Division so wildly disastrous. This division is full of people who keep talking about how a lack of market discipline and consequences for one’s actions, end up creating lazy and inefficient organisations – so they even have the theoretical understanding of what has caused their own current state.

“Furthermore, this Division has ended up telling our CEO – Christian – whatever he wants to hear, because he is the source of their funding, not the market that they claim they are trying to take over.”

If I were a business executive faced with this problem, it is not too hard to figure out the best course of action.

First of all, I would do whatever I could to stop Christian from funding this Division, because if he continues to fund it, all of the energy and talents of these brilliant people will be entirely wasted, because people respond to incentives, and he who pays the piper calls the tune, and it is essential to turn the attentions of these employees to the actual market, rather than this doddering executive.

Secondly, I would continually remind the people in this Division that they had not in fact achieved any of the goals that they had set for themselves – or, if they had achieved them, there was no way of knowing, because nothing was being tested, measured, reported on, and there were no post mortems whatsoever for any of the failed projects.

As long as Christian kept funding this Libertarian Division, I would be fully aware that the likelihood of instilling any responsibility for the actual achievement of goals, and creating any initiative or desire to change tactics or existing approaches, would be impossible. There would be no point attempting to hire people with greater discipline and focus to join this group, because such people would simply be ignored, scorned, and protected from their own failures. This Libertarian Division, like everyone else, knows exactly on which side its bread is buttered.

I would spend some time trying to get this Libertarian Division to stop taking funding from Christian, by writing about how bad Christian’s business judgement was, and how his money was creating an environment of laziness, pontificating, self-congratulation – and utter futility.
Of course, since I am a rational and empirical businessman, I would not beat my head against this wall for too long. After a certain amount of time, if no progress was being made, and if the heads of this Division simply stopped responding to my emails and phone calls, then I would take another approach – you could call it writing a book, if you like.

I could scarcely criticise the heads of this Libertarian Division for failing to be self-critical and empirical, and continue to beat my head against the walls of their indifference and hostility. I would put my criticisms out there, and see what response came back – if those criticisms were ignored, and I were personally attacked repeatedly by employees of this Libertarian Division, then of course I would accept that reality is what it is, and take another course.

Since I was unable to stop Christian’s funding, and since I was unable to get the leaders of the Libertarian Division to review their failures and alter their course of action, I would take the next step in attempting to rescue the goal that we all supposedly share.

I would appeal to the greed of those who wish to spend their lives in pursuit of something which can be achieved, and who wish to add to the practical and achievable virtue in the world, and who wish to begin laying the foundations for a human liberty which can in fact be won.

If a friend who is eager for an enjoyable, productive, and positive work environment tells you that they want to join the post office, what would you tell them?

Surely, you would tell him that joining the post office is a terrible decision, because forty percent of post office employees are ex-military, a stifling and soul crushing union controls everything, there is no free market discipline or opportunity, and everything is politics, abuse, futility, and annoyance.

It is not likely that you will be able to talk people out of being postal workers if they are only a few years from retirement, or are heavily invested in their careers, or who actually do not want to have anything to do with the free market, but rather want to sit around on their unionised asses, eating doughnuts, and bitching about their supervisors.

Thus, to deal with this Libertarian Division, I would focus my efforts not on cutting off Christian’s funding, which is impossible, or on trying to talk long-time division employees out of ditching their over-funded privileges – but rather, the best thing that I could do for the company as a whole would be to try to prevent as many people as possible from acting under the delusion that joining the Libertarian Division would bring them any real happiness, or efficacy, or the contentment and self-esteem that comes from tangible achievement.

I would do my best to communicate to those who were looking to achieve something great with their lives that the last place they should ever go is the Libertarian Division. It is true that this Division continually talks about its grand plans, massive schemes, inevitable successes, and wonderful achievements, but I would continually point out the fact that these only exist in the fantasies of those trapped in the Division. I would continually point out the true facts of the matter, which are that the division constantly wastes money, wastes time, fails to achieve its goals, sits idly by and refuses to reform its approach despite the fact that it is eternally losing ground, gets carpal tunnel syndrome from continually patting itself on the back and publishing self congratulatory articles about its wonderful “achievements,” makes wild statements of both intent and achievement while either ignoring or viciously attacking anyone who dares to point out the basic fact that less than nothing has actually been achieved, and that making up achievements is a pitiful and delusional substitute for actually achieving something in the real world.

You cannot get people to quit the post office who are already there, but you can at least do your best to help people avoid the mistake of joining it.

That, really, is my goal in this book. I may not be able to convince you that the approach I suggest is the best one – and it may not be, for all I know. Like my director said twenty years ago, we have to do something, rather than nothing – and the first step to doing something is to recognise that we are in fact doing less than nothing.

To continue the above analogy, I may not be able to get you to become a self-starting entrepreneur, but if I can at least get you to not join the post office, I have certainly done something worthwhile.

Perhaps in the future people will look back upon the proposals in this book and call them foolish, mad, delusional, ridiculous – and that is completely fine by me! Perhaps all that will come out of this book is the understanding that what we are doing is not working, and that we need to begin to creatively assault the basic problem. I may not be able to prove that the world is round, but if all that I do is convince people that the world is not flat, at least we can begin exploring the alternatives.

== The Presence Of Absence ==
When you tell someone that taxation is coercion, what is their response? Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, they will not deal with the simple fact that their government is a prison built upon a foundation of force.

Unfortunately, due to the three false approaches described above, libertarianism as a movement has never really tried to deal with the basic fact that its most simple argument is almost universally rejected.

When we compare the taxation equals force argument (TEF) to the theory of evolution, it comes up woefully short in terms of general acceptance.
Fundamentally, the only reason that someone rejects the theory of evolution is because they are superstitious, and believes that God blew some dust and made a man in His own image, and that we are descended from that man – surprisingly enough, given that we have belly buttons, and we can assume that God does not, unless we need to start searching for His ancestry as well.

Resistance to the theory of evolution is clearly centred around religious bigotry – what have libertarians done over the past few hundred years to identify the source of the near universal rejection of the TEF?

You would think that this would be job one – there is no more important resistance to overcome for libertarians than the opposition to the TEF. If we cannot convince people that the government is force, the entire libertarian position becomes woefully incomprehensible – a random grab-bag of dislike of authority, hatred of outsiders, religious addiction, some crazed desire to return to a mythological past where the Founding Fathers could walk on water – the whole philosophy becomes little more than a nutty fringe element of incomprehensible resistance to – what? Without an understanding of the TEF argument, what on earth are libertarians obsessed with? What is the point?

The basic fact that the libertarian movement has never seriously attempted to answer the question – why do people reject the fact that taxation equals force? – is something that is almost incomprehensible, as long as we imagine that libertarianism is about getting people to accept TEF, which it is not – it is all about getting funding from Christians, and jobs for free-market academics.

If we wish to gain any kind of real traction in society – if we do not want to end up wasting our lives spinning our wheels, then we do in fact have to answer that most basic question: why are our simple arguments so universally rejected?

There comes a time in every person's life when they have to stop blaming other people.

There comes a time in any movement’s life where it has to stop blaming external circumstances.

It is hard to find where in the libertarian movement this most basic question is even asked, let alone answered. When I have brought it up, in various environments, I have gotten the most mealy-mouthed platitudes in return, such as, “Well, change takes time,” or, “People are dumb,” or, “It’s really not that easy a concept to understand,” and so on.

Again and again, in libertarianism, we see these blind assertions of arbitrary “facts” – without any evidence or reasoning whatsoever.

Naturally, this is associated with the exact same Christian habit, such as, when asking where the world came from, “God made it!”

== Why People Reject The TEF Argument ==
As I said above, and as I have argued in more emotional terms in my novel The God of Atheists, the corruptions of the present can all be traced back to the initial decisions of the past.

The decision to ally itself with Christianity turned libertarianism from a social science into a mere mascot for religious bigotry. If libertarians had remained true to the methodology of their discipline, they would have scornfully rejected the financial bait of superstition. Every movement has its price, to be sure, but I do believe that a movement dedicated to rationality, liberty, and independence from arbitrary authority should have held out for more than a few thousand dollars and a bag of musty Bibles.

Once the decision was made to join forces with superstition, a key element became immediately scrubbed from the intellectual arsenal of libertarianism.

=== Psychology ===
If you do not understand at least some of the basic tenets of psychology, you will be largely unable to break repetitive and pointless patterns.
Psychology is based upon the principle that there are unconscious and opposing forces or personas within the mind. When we look at the body, we can understand the purpose of each of the organs, given enough time and research, and there is nothing hidden within the body that prevents it from achieving its goals – or, if there is, we call it a visible disease, that we can see and hopefully treat.

In the mind, though, there is a kind of invisible cancer called avoidance, wherein thoughts which cause anxiety, fear, anger, or other kinds of emotional distress can be repressed or ignored.

There is a lot that is controversial about psychology, but three basic principles remain incontrovertible:
#Early childhood experiences have an enormous impact on personality and brain development.
#Significant aspects of the mind remain unavailable to our conscious ego (the unconscious).
#Constantly avoiding or repressing your own thoughts and feelings results in bad mental health.

The relationship between repression and anxiety is very well documented, and the most basic defence against anxiety is dissociation.

Another well documented and well understood psychological phenomenon is that of projection, which is the habit of ascribing our own negative qualities to other people or things. One common example of this which most of us who have debated over the Internet are well aware of is the phenomenon of a man coming into a debate with highly provocative or insulting opinions, who then accuses everyone else of being mysteriously “aggressive.” Similarly, people who have an abusive “inner critic” will often project their experience of endless self-attacks into some external form, such as imagining that various people are out to get them, or obsessing over government regulations or currency manipulations, and so on.

If I were a therapist, and libertarianism were a patient of mine, the first question I would ask, as it lounged on my couch, is why it sees corruption everywhere it looks.

After a certain amount of psychological exploration, we would doubtless discover – as is almost always the case – that the corruption that libertarianism sees everywhere in the world (except itself!) is actually rooted in its own hypocritical decisions. This would actually explain why libertarianism fundamentally does not actually want to eliminate corruption in the world beyond, because that would be psychologically disastrous to most of those involved in the movement.

If we lose the ability to project our negative traits onto some other person or entity, we actually experience the anxiety, fear, and rage within ourselves.

When libertarians decided to take Christian cash, they automatically and unconsciously decided that theirs was a movement that was going to be entirely hostile towards psychology and any depth of self-knowledge.

The reason for this is that all religion is profoundly anti-psychological in nature. The simple reason for this is that God himself is such a primal projection of human nature – fears, desires, and self-importance – that in order to preserve the fantasy that God exists somewhere “out there,” religion has to virulently and endlessly oppose the exploration of the self and an understanding of psychology.

One of the main components of achieving deep self-knowledge is the differentiation between “self” and “other.” This sounds ridiculously simple, but it is actually quite complex. I can only really touch on the surface of this journey, but to give a simple example, when we look at a sports fan painting themselves in silly colours and madly cheering some team, we can easily see that such a person clearly has invested their ego, happiness, and fears, into the uncontrollable actions of others. This is an example of confusing the world, and the people in it, for yourself.
Similarly, when someone gets all choked up and dewy-eyed when a flag is raised, or a song is played, then clearly they are mistaking their own personality and values for some external symbol such as a piece of cloth or some notes of music.

It is really impossible to genuinely know yourself if you keep confusing yourself for people in costume, or people playing a sport, or pieces of cloth, or strains of music, or a race, or a language, or a geography – or an imaginary God.

Self-knowledge requires a strong and clear differentiation between who you are, and what everything else is. You cannot accurately identify a cow if you keep thinking that a cow is a “country,” or a “noble soldier,” or “loyalty,” or your “hope for victory,” or a “Jewish zombie who flew up to heaven and eternally judges your brain.”

The growth of psychological and emotional maturity is the slow and often painful process of withdrawing your projections from the world so that you can see what the world actually is.

Again, this sounds ridiculously easy, but it is very often blindingly difficult. Most people wander around the world with highly reflective sunglasses on – but pointing the wrong way – so that they are only seeing a distorted reflection of themselves, rather than the world itself.
Religion is the most primal projection mechanism of all. We are alive, we possess rational consciousness; the universe is not alive, and does not possess rational consciousness. We are born, the universe is not. We worry about our virtue, the universe does not. We bring truth into the universe, the universe does not bring truth to us.<ref>For more information on this, you might be interested in my video/audio series “An Introduction to Philosophy,” available on my website at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/videos.html</ref> The degree to which religion facilitates the projection of anthropomorphic characteristics into a dead and empty universe is truly staggering when you begin to really see it.

The pursuit of self-knowledge is in many ways the end of religion. By aligning itself with the primitive superstition of psychological projection, libertarianism entirely walled off its access to one of the greatest insights of modernity, which is the discovery and exploration of the unconscious.

It is in the unconscious that we find the answer as to why people consistently reject the simple and obvious argument that taxation equals force.

The unconscious is an enormous aspect of the mind that processes empirical information with staggering rapidity, and provides value-based responses in the form of emotional reactions.

The causal chain of processing that occurs in the unconscious is unavailable to the conscious mind without a great deal of introspection and self-knowledge. What cognitive psychologists call “core beliefs” only occur to us consciously as feelings. Feelings do result from cognitive associations – a species of logical reasoning, so to speak – but those associations are not easily available to the conscious mind.

We fully understand that if we stick our hand into a fire, a lack of knowledge of neurobiology will not prevent us from experiencing pain. In the same way, a lack of conscious understanding of our core beliefs will not prevent us from reacting emotionally to those beliefs.

In fact, the less we consciously understand our deepest thoughts and feelings, the more those thoughts and feelings have “the ring of truth,” so to speak.

For instance, if we do not understand that patriotism is a collective delusion – the theft of the pride of virtue through the accident of geography – then the warm glow that we feel in the presence of patriotism remains unquestioned for us. As a consequence, when we are evaluating information related to our country, our unconscious tendency will be to automatically accept that which is most favourable to our delusional emotional state, and reject with hostility that which punctures the vanity of our fantasy attachment.

However, once we realise that our attachment to a mere concept (“America!”) is empirically invalid and emotionally hollow, we can begin to deal with our emotions as they really are, with regards to ourselves, and our own personal history, and we can begin to uncover our core beliefs, which are generally formed very early in life, up to the age of five or so, as a result of our early childhood experiences.

Such a process, of course, scarcely benefits those who profit from patriotism.

In the same way, once we understand that there is no God, we go through the natural disorientation and emotional emptiness that our former hysterical “worship” was designed to cover up. In a very real way, this is the inevitable withdrawal that comes when you stop taking a mind-altering drug.

All of the thoughts and emotions that formerly were invested in the fantasy projection of a god now collapse back into the personality, and can be dealt with as self-generated phenomena – not stimulated by some external deity, but created in the personality through personal history and prior decisions.

This is the process known to Jungian psychologists as individuation, or the recognition that all internal emotional states are generated by internal phenomena – not by externalities like stained glass, near-naked bleeding weeping gods, bits of stained cloth, or strains of music.
The incredible value that results from the difficult process of individuation is an understanding and mastery of one’s own internal state. No longer are you like the hysterical sports fan whose happiness trembles on the spot where a leather ball may – or may not – land. No longer are you like the brain-addled patriot, who takes wild existential pride in the proximity of certain dirt to their mother’s womb. No longer are you the desperate and fearful religious addict, who begs for the favours and fears the punishments of a God that really “lives” deep within their own brain, in their own amygdala and hypothalamus, shouting up from the invisible caves of early childhood.

When you ally yourself with an organisation that profits from keeping people in a state of psychological retardation, which flourishes only by provoking the most dangerous and infantile aspects of human consciousness, and which grows only as the self-knowledge of its members shrinks, you are not building a bridge to the future, but rather voluntarily throwing yourself into a chasm of prehistory.

Libertarians know this – unconsciously, of course – and that is why they worship a time before the rise of psychology – the golden days of the Founding Fathers, stirring writings and noble paintings, when the Constitution was written with fiery words on the tapestry of history, and a new nation was forged out of the blah blah blah...

On a much smaller level, of course, this is why so many libertarians turned against my show – Freedomain Radio – when I and my listeners began to really talk about psychology and self-knowledge.

This is an indication of the astoundingly rapid processing that occurs in the unconscious. The moment that my show began to turn towards early childhood experiences, practical self-knowledge, emotional defences, and the necessity of withdrawing emotional projections from the world, all the former support I had in the libertarian community mysteriously dried up.

Unconsciously, a sequence flashed with enormous rapidity through the minds of most libertarians, which went a little something like this:
*ZOMG!
*Stef is talking about undoing emotional defences and psychological projections!
*Religion is based on emotional defences and psychological projections!
*Libertarianism is based on religion!
*Thus Stef is talking about undoing libertarianism!
*I need a pay cheque!
*ZOMG!

The fundamental reason that libertarians have never asked the basic question – why do people reject the TEF argument? – is that the answer lies in the unconscious, and in deep knowledge of both the self and of other people.

In other words, the answer lies in that which unravels religion.

Since libertarianism relies on religion, and religion survives by opposing psychology, libertarians had no choice but to oppose an increase in psychological understanding.

Because libertarianism is so opposed to psychology, it cannot ask any questions which involve the unconscious. As a result, it is stuck in a blind repetition of earlier mistakes, like anyone who resists self-knowledge. It cannot examine the resistance that society as a whole has towards libertarian arguments, because that resistance is unconscious – and so it has to make up empty-headed stories to explain away its endless failures – thus guaranteeing their repetition.

Psychological, emotional, and intellectual maturity demands that when we do not know the answer to a question, we state with direct honesty: “I do not know.”

This is not an approach that has ever been part of any religion – in fact, religion is a endless cluster of deluded attacks on every reasonable question under the sun!<ref>Which, according to the Old Testament, orbits the Earth.</ref>

This is why no post mortem has ever been performed on a libertarian project – because such a post mortem would reveal an appalling ignorance as to its failure. Since libertarianism is full of enormously intelligent people, it would not take very long for them to begin to figure out why they were so abysmally ignorant – which was that they had been avoiding the question.

Once they figured out that they were avoiding the question, the next question would be: why?

And so, step-by-step, down the magic staircase they would go, to the roots of their own evasions and emotions, their fears and greed, the dark side that is in all of us, and all those other difficult and messy aspects of humanity that scare so many “rational” people.

No, no – much easier to just cash in all those juicy Christian checks and go write another useless article about the Federal Reserve.

== Withdrawing Projection: An Example ==
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has been called the “Rashomon war” – a reference to a Japanese play where everyone has wildly divergent views of a theft in the woods – due to its ever-changing justifications. None of the “factual” claims advanced to support the invasion held up to any reasonable scrutiny, even before the war began.

Those who do not understand or appreciate psychology will forever root around the surface justifications for such genocidal murders, and remain perpetually baffled and disoriented in this ever-shifting hall of mirrors.

If none of the reasons advanced are the real reasons, how can psychology help us?

If we recall the three fundamental psychological axioms – the enormous effects of early childhood experiences, the existence of the unconscious, and the dangers of repression – some possible sources for the drive to war become much clearer.

George Bush reports that he asked God whether or not to invade Iraq. As long as George imagined that he was communing with some vast interstellar intelligence outside his own skull, the “answer” that he received had the ring of an omniscient absolute.

If George knew even a little about psychology, he would understand that he was not in fact praying to God, but rather “submerging” a question into his own unconscious. Psychology fully supports our general experience that our personalities are composed of more than a single “voice,” in that we often debate with ourselves, experience contradictory impulses and ideas, experience nightly dreams that can be utterly at odds with our conscious values, and so on. In fact, it would be impossible to explain the phenomenon of creative writing – with its varied and believable characters, all coming from one mind – without accepting the reality that our personality is a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than a single and unified dictatorship of the ego.

Thus George cannot be praying to God – since God does not exist – but rather he is asking a question of himself.

When the “answer” comes back, if George is at all interested in self-knowledge and the withdrawal of projection, he will understand that it is not God telling him to invade Iraq, but rather it is an expression of his own unconscious desires.

With this understanding, George can then begin to examine why he himself wants to invade Iraq, rather than operate under the delusion that some eternal and omniscient ghost is telling him what to do.

Once George can begin to examine his own motives for invasion, he can begin the journey of self-discovery, where he will end up exploring one of the potential scenarios below – or another one, which remains obscure:
#As a result of being abused as a child by his mother, George has grown up with a deep hatred of his father, who did not protect him. This hatred is utterly unacceptable to him – and so, when Saddam Hussein threatens to kill George’s father, Hussein is actually expressing a repressed murderous wish that lies deep in George’s unconscious. By attacking Hussein, George is actually “attacking” his own desire to kill his father.<ref>In fact, Bush claimed as one of his reasons for invading Iraq the fact that Saddam Hussein “threatened to kill my dad”.</ref>
#George’s political ambitions are driven by deep feelings of personal self-hatred, resulting from his early maternal abuse, alcoholic self-medication, and general feelings of invisibility and worthlessness. Deep down, he truly hates the American public for enabling these hollow ambitions, and so takes out his rage against them by committing them to war.
#George’s antisocial tendencies were early expressed by his childhood habit of blowing up frogs – childhood cruelty towards animals is a clear sign of sadism. These expressions of inner torture were really cries for help, which went unheeded in his family, and in his society. His inner horror continually drives escalations of sadism and violence, with the purpose that someone, somewhere, will understand, and empathise with his psychological agony. Unfortunately, rather than empathise with this pain, the American public rewards him by giving him the power of life and death over millions. Since he has developed a habit of acting out violence as a cry for help, he initiates war as the ultimate expression of his truly apocalyptic self-hatred.
#When George was a child, his mother was all-powerful, and abused him emotionally and physically, scratching him violently and screaming at him. Thus George understood that power is always associated with the abuse of the helpless. Furthermore, George’s mother would veer between affection and abuse. Saddam Hussein was a “friend” of the United States, and then became an “enemy,” just as George did with his own mother when he was a child. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was essentially helpless in the face of US military power, and so George re-enacted the principle “attack the helpless person who was formerly your friend” by invading Iraq.
#Due to the mechanism of projection, George was able to project his own sadism onto Saddam Hussein – which meant that he experienced Saddam Hussein as extremely dangerous. His own increasing murderous rage – which would in fact trigger a war – was projected onto the Iraqi dictator, and so George genuinely felt that Saddam was “about to attack” him – when of course the complete opposite was true.
#The murderous rage that George experienced from his parents was re-enacted against the Iraqi children, half a million of whom died as a result of the US and UK led sanctions against Iraq – started by George’s own father after the Gulf War. Once George continued his father’s role of “destroyer of children,” he could no longer escape the role of “parental abuser,” but could only escalate the murderous destruction of others.

None of the above explanations may be valid, of course – the purpose is merely to highlight the self-knowledge that can be attained when we look inwards, into the myths that have created us, and that we have created – rather than stare into the empty heavens and dream of conversations with dead constellations.

== Why People Resist Libertarianism ==
Once we understand the amazing power of the unconscious, its uncanny ability to process enormous amounts of information virtually instantaneously, we can begin to unravel the mystery of why people reject libertarianism.

=== Resistance To Truth ===
Prior to the seventeenth century, all human societies – without exception – were founded on abuse, violence, brutality, and a strict and vicious hierarchy.<ref>For more on this, please visit http://www.psychohistory.com</ref> What fundamentally sustained this hierarchy were lies about the nature of power. Mere men were given the label “King,” and called divine, or divinely sanctioned. Other men, wearing what often appeared to be tea-cosies on their heads, were considered to be in direct and constant communication with divine beings, and so their word was the law of the gods.

The average man and woman saw things very differently indeed, deep in their heart of hearts. We can only imagine how many times throughout history men looked at a fat fool in a gold crown and knew that he was a mortal man, just like them, except worse. We cannot know how many peasants kneeled before a sneering priest, squinting up through their lowered lashes, seeing the snot in his nose, and knowing in their soul that he was just a smug and pompous version of their own selves.

In the old story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” two tailors arrive at a kingdom and promised to make the King a spectacular suit, using a thread with the magical ability to remain invisible to anyone who was not worthy of his position. They began pretending to make the suit, using no thread or cloth at all, but only miming their work. Whenever the king “wears” the work in progress, his courtiers and ministers all express amazement at the beauty of the suit, because they do not want to be revealed as people who are not worthy of their positions.
Eventually, the King is carried in a procession through the town, where everyone cries in wonder at the beauty of the suit they cannot see, until one child stands up, points at the King, and asks in a loud voice why the king is naked.

This, in my opinion, is the best fairy tale ever. I really could care less about knights and dragons, but the truth that is contained in this story could fill a book shelf.

Embedded in this tale of course is the general fear that people have about speaking the truth, even when it is perfectly obvious – but what is even more delightful, and terrifying, about this story is the complete absence of violence.

Everyone says that they can see the suit that is not there because of their own insecurities, their fear that they are not fit for their positions – but what society in history has ever been able to maintain a predatory hierarchy such as an aristocracy without the use of violence? For heaven’s sake, we cannot even maintain a parliamentary democracy without threatening everyone with a gun if they do not turn over half their income!

Openly identifying the violence at the root of mythological power was always and forever sheer suicide, throughout our entire evolutionary development as a species. Learning not to see what was blatantly obvious was foundational to surviving as an individual.

The amazing thing about the fairy tale above is that it describes how afraid people are to speak truth to power – and yet it itself re- mains afraid to speak truth to power, because it blames the fear of the people on the internal state of insecurity rather than the external threats of torture and beheading. It also shows the insecurity as radiating outward from the King – in other words, the people are insecure because the King is insecure. It is certainly true that no King can rationally feel that he deserves his position, but it is certainly not true that people were insecure because Kings were anxious and insecure, but rather because their Kings were sadistic and genocidal.

=== The Rational Fear Of Truth ===
Many of our desires and fears are hard-wired into our brains, down deep in the neurological cortex of our minds. Our sexual desires, our fight and flight mechanisms, our desire for water when we are thirsty, food when we are hungry, and rest when we are tired – this constellation of passions, needs, and emotions are not learned, but rather innate – babies do not learn to cry when they are hungry, but are born with that ability, as countless red-eyed parents can attest.

We have a natural aversion to that which is highly likely to bring about danger. Natural selection has done a wonderful job of picking those out of the gene pool who do things that get them killed.

The brutal power structures that dominated almost all of human history used endless violence to maintain their rule, but always had to at least provide the appearance that the violence was caused by the immorality – the “disobedience” – of the ruled. Throughout history, mock trials have been the norm, which drape the veneer of justice over what is, essentially, a Mafia hit.

The lies required to sustain the illusion that murder is virtue are virtually without number. The obvious irrationality of the rulers are recast as the “rationality” of gods. The obvious hypocritical double standards of power are “justified” according to the divine right of kings. Any citizens who attempt to break the chains that bind them are slaughtered wholesale, and then labelled “dangerous” to the other citizens – a mind-bending reversal of what is actually true! Societies wracked by dictatorships, wars, plagues, and famines are called “ordered,” while even the thought of a voluntary society not run by genocidal criminals is called “chaotic” and “anarchic.”

Since the dawn of our species, people have been endlessly slaughtered for speaking the simple truth about the violence of those in power. In addition, anyone who listened to such speeches – or was even in the same family, or in the same house – was also tortured and butchered.

Is it so shocking to think that the same instincts that compel us to run from a bear would also compel us to fear and shun those who speak the truth about power?

A bear can be out-run – thugs with clubs in the name of the King cannot.

Furthermore, those at the peak of the pyramid of bloody power always sent spies radiating out through the community, attempting to root out those who might be open to the truth about power. These oily beasts would curl up to peasants, speak subtle treason, and look for agreement. Any slave who hesitated to repel their words would be dragged into the street and dismembered.

Revolution was impossible; the truth was suicidal, and virtually everyone who whispered about the iniquity of power was a slaughtering spy.
When the truth about power enters into a conversation, Stone Age defences rise from the base of the brain, creating near pathological anxiety and hostility. In a moment, a civilised coffee shop becomes a fire-lit cave, and all the shiny pleasantries of modern democracy shatter before the emotional percussion of a falling club – revealed in the hands of the ruler only the moment before it lands on the skull of the foolish listener.

These associations are not conscious. This unbelievably rapid sequence of thought is imprinted below the awareness of the ego we know and love so well.

The greater the danger to life, the more automatic and unconscious the response to that danger needs to be. If you accidentally put your hand into a fire, your spine will detect the pain and jerk your hand back before the signals reach your brain.<ref>Biologically speaking, of course, your spine is only using you to make another spine, and so its self-interest makes perfect sense.</ref> If an unexpected noise reaches your ears while you are sleeping, your brain will yank you awake, your fight or flight adrenaline already pumping.

We are ringed by automatic sentinels that reason not from the reason of the present, but rather from the imminent deaths of history.

If you are not aware of the depth and power of the unconscious, then you will introduce the topic that taxation equals force with no understanding whatsoever of the degree of stress, anxiety, and hostility that your words evoke in others.

The person that you are talking to will probably not have any greater understanding of what is happening to them than you do. The hostility that they feel will arise in them as if out of nowhere.

It is a well-recognised psychological phenomenon that most people will almost automatically and immediately invent conceptual reasons for unexpected emotional distress. First comes the shock, or the fear, or the anger – and then comes the “explanation,” after the fact. Almost everyone reasons ex post facto, in reaction to unexpected emotional distress. Almost every argument you will ever hear is a form of emotional self-management, designed to keep the real truth at bay – not from you, but rather from the person who is arguing.

When someone hears that taxation is force, their unconscious hears all of the implications contained in that statement immediately, at light speed, and leaps into action to protect them from being tortured and killed.

The unconscious does not have a calendar. The unconscious has never heard of the Bill of Rights, or free speech.

The unconscious is a fierce guardian, blind to time.

This aspect of our unconscious developed in a time when we saw people who spoke the truth – or listened to the truth – slaughtered on a whim.
Those people who with open and snowy innocence spoke the truth as it occurred to them fill half the unnamed pits of our genocidal history. They did not survive to pass their mutations along.

Those who feared the truth, and feared those who spoke the truth, did survive – to teach their children to fear and shun the truth, and to see those children who did not, taken and murdered.

We are still so early in the development of our species that the world is not run by truth, or reason, but by the unconscious, by the blind and beautiful pit-bull of history that will kill and die to save its master.

=== Anger In The Face Of Truth ===
When you speak the truth to someone – let us call him Meletus – he experiences a sudden stab of fear and irritation. He does not want to be in this conversation, but he also cannot leave it, because in the past – our collective past – that would have indicated guilt. You have put Meletus in a difficult situation, and he resents you for it.

Meletus does not believe that he is a slave, for to believe that he is a slave would be to consciously understand the true nature of political power, which is the threat of overwhelming force against the legally disarmed.

Asking Meletus to admit that he is a slave, and to accept the argument that taxation equals force is true, is the direct equivalent, to his unconscious at least, of attempting to throw him into a tank full of sharks.

Historically, slaves were never allowed to point out the violence of their rulers, or to consider themselves slaves at all, since that was just another way of pointing out such violence. Thus Meletus must make up justifications for his rulers because he is frightened of the truth of their violence – because throughout history accepting or speaking that truth got people killed.

Thus, you provoke anxiety in Meletus – anxiety that he cannot consciously admit to himself, since that leads down the path to real physical danger. You have also provoked a feeling of humiliation in him, by creating fear and anxiety within him that he has to avoid.

=== Levelling ===
Most adults, when they experience humiliation, attempt to “level up,” by creating an impression of false superiority. Since Meletus feels “put down” relative to you, he will strive to put you down in return, to restore his feeling of “self-esteem.”<ref>For more on this, see just about any Doctor Phil show you can find.</ref>

How many times do libertarians experience condescension from those they bring the “TEF” argument to?

How often have libertarians been portrayed – in word or in deed – as naive, oddly resentful, out of touch, or as pointless mavericks, hopeless theorisers, and ungrateful citizens?

How many times do libertarians have to be lectured to about the “social contract,” and the “free-market of democracy,” and the “right to leave if you do not approve,” and so on?

How many times do libertarians have to see their arguments against violence re-framed as arguments against voluntarism?

How many times do libertarians have to see their arguments for voluntarism re-framed as arguments for violence?

Apparently, that number, in the absence of psychological understanding, appears to be functionally infinite.

=== The Fear Of Others ===
Deep down, everybody knows that what is called “society” is little more than a series of violent mythologies designed to keep the powers that be aloft.

Biologically, people are designed for conformity with the group rather than integrity to the truth, since conformity encouraged survival, and integrity mostly got you killed.

When you ask someone to admit the violence and mythology of what they call “morality,” it is not the rulers who primarily make them afraid, but rather it is their peer social group – their friends, acquaintances, work colleagues, and family.

I say this based on twenty-five years of experience – I am sure you have had exactly the same experience – which is that I have been arguing for voluntarism and freedom for decades, and have never once been attacked, sanctioned, or even goosed by state agents.

No, it is always and forever only my fellow citizens who attack the truth – who attack me, rather, since the truth cannot be “attacked,” but only accepted or disproved.

When I posed a series of rational and empirical questions and criticisms of the efficacy of the Ron Paul campaign, I was not audited by the IRS or cornered by men in black. Rather, it was the libertarian community and the Ron Paul supporters who turned against me.

Everyone knows that when you begin to question the philosophical and moral assumptions – often unconscious, to be sure, but even more dangerous because of that – of your peer social group, they will turn on you most savagely.

Every Christian knows that if they begin to persistently question the existence of God, they will be rapidly ejected from their supposedly loving peer group. And they also know, deep down, that they will be ejected not because they are wrong, but rather because they are right. Meletus decided to attack Socrates, rather than any of the other thousands of Sophists infesting the culture of ancient Greece – because Socrates was right – not necessarily in all his conclusions, since no one achieves that, but rather in his fluid, empirical, and rational methodology for approaching the truth.

Everyone knows that what they consider necessary conformity is actually just enslavement to error.

Everyone knows that it is not the state that keeps us in chains; we keep each other in chains. The state merely profits from our willingness – eagerness even – to attack each other.

It is far cheaper to keep slaves when the slaves eagerly police themselves.

Religion is fundamentally not a belief in an invisible God, but the fear of attack by the peer group.

Statism is fundamentally not the belief that the government is virtuous, but the fear of attack by the peer group if one dares to say otherwise.
Libertarianism is fundamentally not the belief that political action, religious affiliation, and academic education will bring freedom, but rather the fear of attack by the libertarian peer group if one dares to question these axioms.

== On A Personal Note ==
I came relatively late in life to the libertarian movement – I had nothing to do with it until my late thirties, less than three years ago.

Like most people who come to a new movement which seems compatible with many values they already hold, I took what libertarians said mostly at face value. When they talked of their genuine desires to free the world from statism, I thought: excellent! When their articles exploded many of the mythologies I had long suspected as false (“Lincoln freed the slaves!”), I was thrilled! I dug deep into libertarian literature with great excitement and optimism.

I suppose it was because I brought other, more disciplined and empirical skills and experiences to the table – my entrepreneurial endeavours in a variety of fields – that I slowly began to become uncomfortable with the libertarian habit of making baseless claims, and then becoming resentful when asked for evidence.

I had seen enough sleazy salesmen in the business world to know a con when I saw one.

In my mind, I began to divide the libertarian world into the “end of the world nut jobs” and the more rational empiricists. I placed most of the religious libertarians into the former category, but reserved places of honour within my mind for the various scholars and activists who seemed more rational.

I accepted the fact that a few of my early articles were edited to remove any content that may be conceivably offensive to religious sentiments. These articles were not about religion, and so I did not mind particularly that a few sentences or paragraphs were struck out before publication.

As I began to pod-cast, very early on I discussed the empirical and rational arguments against the existence of gods. The fact that my articles were still accepted within the libertarian community despite my outright, vocal, and strong atheism, gave me some comfort that religion was not a core topic for libertarianism.

However, when I began to talk about psychological motives, personal history, and the effect of early childhood experiences on later thoughts and feelings, I began to feel a certain chill shiver through the libertarian community.

Rumours began to spread that Freedomain Radio was some sort of cult, which “commanded” people to leave their families – despite the fact that of the roughly fifty thousand people who have listened to the show, about twenty have separated from abusive families.

I was also called “dictatorial” for asking abusive or aggressive people to stop posting on the FDR forum – about thirty in over two years, or less than one percent of the total membership – pretty good for a forum which deals with such volatile topics!

I have also been accused of “driving” the conversation in particular directions, in other words, towards psychological and relationship issues - which is a truly astounding claim, coming as it does from those who claim a deep understanding of the free market!

For those who do not seem able to grasp how the free market really works, I will provide a brief explanation.

I do not have the capacity to “drive” the conversation. I did deal with some family and psychological issues, starting at about pod-cast seventy – but if people were not interested in those theories, the topic would have been entirely dropped! I also did pod-casts on Shakespeare, which proved to be fairly uninteresting to the vast majority of my listeners, so that topic has not come up again.

The same libertarians who endlessly argue that it is impossible for a corporation to impose its will upon consumers in the free-market, and impossible to gain a dictatorial monopoly – also say that I somehow “control” and “dominate” my customers.<ref>It is interesting to me that not one of these criticisms has ever come from entrepreneurs who have actually worked in the free-market, but rather only from religious, political, and academic types – for fairly obvious reasons.</ref>

The simple fact is that I follow and talk about what my listeners are most interested in – just like any other entrepreneur. Every Sunday afternoon I ask my listeners what is uppermost in their mind. For at least eighteen months, I can scarcely think of a single topic that has been philosophical or economic in nature. Empirically, objectively, people want to talk about personal ethics, immediate relationships, and the deep struggle we all face to live with integrity in our own lives.

I do not interrupt listeners who are asking about economics and “order” them to talk about highly personal issues – as if that were even possible! Like any good entrepreneur, I let my customers drive the provision of services.

If I did not, there would be no show.

I once talked to a libertarian radio talk show host who tried to do a three-day series on personal relationships, only to have to abandon it after less than two days, due to listener indifference and outright hostility. As a listener wrote: “I listen to your show to find out what’s wrong with the government, not for dating advice!”

That is the awesome power we show hosts wield!

One of the most popular segments in Freedomain Radio was “Ask A Therapist,” where my wife answered questions about personal relationships and mental health. Those who call in to the Sunday show almost exclusively ask questions about personal relationships and mental health. When a listener contacts me for a conversation, it is almost always about personal relationships and mental health.

These are just the facts of market demand – and it is entirely ridiculous that so-called free-market “experts” believe that I can somehow magically control my customers. For the sake of all that is rational, I run a charity, and so am far more dependent on the kindness of strangers than most organisations that provide fee-based products or services!

It is also an astounding monument to hypocrisy that I have been accused of “controlling” my donators by atheist libertarians who refuse to challenge religious libertarians! If I am not dependent upon the voluntary goodwill of my donators, but can somehow magically control them, then why are libertarians so afraid to confront religious donators? Why is it that libertarianism has to endlessly appease its religious supporters, but I am somehow in total control over my donators?

Welcome to the wonderful world of psychological projection!

=== Psychology An Me ===
I have been fascinated by psychology since I was in my teens; in my early thirties I went through a few years of very intensive psychotherapy, which I found immensely positive – my wife practices psychology, and runs her own clinic, and was – to her eternal credit – the one who began pushing me towards a psychological understanding of the potentials and challenges of the freedom movement.

I did not at first understand why libertarians – who claim that empirical and rational social sciences such as economics are perfectly valid – would be so hostile towards an empirical and rational social science such as psychology. In my own naivety, I assumed that this was largely because of a lack of understanding of psychology, rather than any innate hostility towards it.

Through my show, I continued to explain the basic tenets of psychology, and participated in a number of listener conversations where I think the value of psychological understanding and deep self-knowledge was more than amply demonstrated. Through Freedomain Radio, people got out of bad relationships, and often into good relationships – they liberated themselves from unproductive and dead-end careers, and revitalised their own work environments. People achieved real freedom in their lives by leaving salaried employment and starting their own companies – and this resulted not from economic explication, but rather a psychological investigation of their own resistance to freedom, which often brought them up against the limitations of their personal relationships.

It was during this phase of Freedomain Radio that I began to hear the first mutterings and accusations that I was running some sort of cult. Several people who were participating on the Freedomain Radio board became volatile and destructive – after attempting to negotiate with them in the hopes of achieving more rational and positive behaviours, I realise that this would be impossible, and I banned them.

Although some people experience my banning of abusive and destructive people with dismay, it is perfectly consistent with my approach to relationships, which is that you try to negotiate and get what you want out of people – and offer them the same opportunity – but if you are unable to come to an agreement on mutually beneficial behaviour, you are in no way obligated to continue the relationship.

I do not view this as an entirely subjective process, of course, since I believe that verbal abuse, name-calling, and passive aggressive provocations, for instance, are not negotiable.

If I host a weekly dinner party, where anyone can drop by, I do have the right to ban people who disrupt the productivity and pleasure of the conversation through verbal abuse.

It is my house after all, and it is testament to the psychological distress of certain libertarians that they rail against my exercise of property rights, while claiming property rights to be a sacrosanct value.

The issue of the Ron Paul candidacy arose shortly after this time. Even before I knew that Ron Paul was a fundamentalist Christian, I criticised political action as merely the illusion of progress, and the draining of resources that could be used more productively elsewhere.

Most libertarians placed enormous hopes in the Ron Paul candidacy, and doubtless experienced my questions, criticisms, and empirical tests for success as irritating, if not enraging – certainly the comments that I received on my videos were spectacularly hostile, and if I had run my private emails through a profanity filter, I would have largely been looking at near-endless rows of asterisks.

I simply could not understand why money was being hurled at a “solution” without any hint of a project plan, testable milestones, and empirical verification of claims – probably as a result of my free-market experience as an entrepreneur, in both the software and artistic fields. The fact that libertarians were wildly enthusiastic about burning through tens of millions of dollars – not to mention countless hours – without once seeming to consider how else these resources could be used – struck me as more of a collective stampede off the cliff of delusion than a rational and disciplined approach to the effective allocation of time and money.

I began to get more suspicious when I saw the “dual-answer” approach to potential donators – those who were concerned with winning were told that Ron Paul could win, while those who were sceptical of that possibility were told that Ron Paul was “educating people.”
Again, I had seen enough of this nonsense in the entrepreneurial world, and spotted these manipulations pretty quickly.

Then, I saw exhortations to donate to the Ron Paul campaign – with mad claims that he could still win – when it had become, for all intents and purposes, impossible for him to do so.

To me, this began to look very close to outright fraud.

As I examined the good Doctor’s candidacy, I began to really see the seedy Christian underbelly of the libertarian movement: Ron Paul’s rejection of evolution – from a man well-trained in the scientific method, and so unable to claim backwoods ignorance – along with the crassly exploitive money-grubbing, hostility to rational questions about the efficacy of this candidacy, an increased and almost hysterical pandering to Christians (for the sake of donations of course), and a general abandonment of restraint, reason, evidence, and plain common sense.

Principles were hurled overboard like heavy crates from a sinking ship – the collective hysteria of “now or never” gripped people in its feverish fist, creating volatile and hostile “us versus them” aggression and paranoia. “If you are against Ron Paul, you are against freedom!” – a chilling echo of Bush’s “He who is not with us is against us” – showed just how far down the well of superstitious collectivism the movement had plummeted.

Those few of us who resisted the pressures of these aggressive delusions were soundly and repetitively attacked for raising rational questions during a time of general hysteria – and after the hysteria had begun to subside, we were not praised – or even recognised – for predicting the futility of the campaign in advance. Instead, ex post facto justifications were invented about the value of educating people through the campaign – again, with little to no empirical evidence.

You could also see the gruesomely irrational spectacle of Ron Paul openly saying on the Colbert Report after he lost so spectacularly that he never had any chance at all – while on the very same show, a few months earlier, he had said that there was a reasonable chance that he just might win.

Of course, this is the kind of ridiculous reversal common to those unable to admit their own corruption. If you say after you have lost spectacularly, that you really thought you could win, then you look kind of deranged, and largely out of touch with reality. If a man claims to genuinely believe that he can win Olympic gold in long-distance running, but cannot even struggle around the track once, clearly he is delusional about his own abilities. Thus it is inevitable that Ron Paul would reverse his estimation of his own chances after his spectacular failure – and without any reference to his prior “optimism” – because Ron Paul is a politician, just like every other politician. He goes to Washington and gets money for his constituents; he says whatever he needs to say to maximise his “credibility” and income in the moment, and he makes wild claims while steadfastly rejecting empirical evidence.

How could it be otherwise? He is a fundamentalist Christian.

As the success of Freedomain Radio continued to grow, I was for quite a while rather surprised at the general indifference – and outright hostility – of the libertarian community towards the show. Given that libertarianism is supposed to be all about voluntarism, surely the voluntary nature of the show would meet with their approval. Surely, given that libertarians are constantly claiming that the poor will be educated in a free society, Freedomain Radio would be a wonderful example of just that – since I give everything away for free, and rely on voluntary donations, those who cannot afford to pay for instruction can still receive it.

Surely, since the Ron Paul supporters were so devoted to educating people about liberty, after the failure of the Ron Paul candidacy, they would at least acknowledge the value of a show that continues to grow and spread arguments for freedom!

When a voluntary organisation educates tens of thousands of people without charging a penny, surely that is a wonderful example of the benevolent free market in action. In my rather deluded optimism, I pictured at least some excitement within the libertarian community about this radical application of free-market ideals, innovative use of technology, and pursuit of a highly unusual business plan. I imagined that people would be curious about the success of Freedomain Radio, and cite it as an example of the power and benevolence of voluntarism, as well as a practical example of how people can be educated who cannot afford it.

It's not like I am some entirely non-credible fringe nut – I studied English literature, economics, and psychology at the undergraduate level, and hold a Masters degree in History from an Ivy League university. I got an ‘A’ on my thesis on intellectual history, based on primary sources on Plato, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. I have been a successful entrepreneur who co-founded and sold a fairly large company, and I have also written and directed a successful play for the theatre. I have lived in England, South Africa, and Canada, and travelled throughout North America, Europe, and China for business.

As the success of the show continued to grow, and the number of pod-cast downloads started to run into the millions, the indifference and hostility of the libertarian movement as a whole started to become truly incomprehensible to me, and I decided to sit down and try to figure out what the implications were of this avoidance.

I am very glad that I did this, because I learned an enormous amount about the movement whose goals I care for very, very deeply.

This book does not result from my hostility towards libertarianism, but rather from my love of freedom, and my desire to build a rational and empirical plan to achieve it.

We cannot go through the church to achieve a free society, because on the other side of the church is always a graveyard.

For those with the eyes to see, religion is a spent force fundamentally, surviving only on the fading momentum of the past. The younger generation is far more intelligent and sceptical than we ever were, and no movement can succeed in gaining their allegiance that abases itself before the superstitions of their elders.

== Rational Libertarians ==

=== The Company One Keeps ===

=== A Universal Contradiction? ===

== Empiricism And This Book ==

== We Can Only Hope We Are Screwing Up ==

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:12:28Z

Anarchei: /* Why People Resist Libertarianism */

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:07:54Z

Anarchei: /* Withdrawing Projection: An Example */

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:05:36Z

Anarchei: /* Why People Reject The TEF Argument */

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T08:01:28Z

Anarchei: /* The Presence Of Absence */

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T07:58:46Z

Anarchei: /* The Effects Of Ethics */

Book:Achieving Freedom/2

2010-11-30T07:51:56Z

Anarchei: Separated book into parts to reduce eventual page size

{{header
| title = [[Achieving Freedom]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2008
| section = Root Causes
| previous = [[Achieving Freedom/1|How (Not) To Achieve Freedom]]
| next =
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

== The Effects Of Ethics ==

=== The Libertarian Division ===

== The Presence Of Absence ==

== Why People Reject The TEF Argument ==

=== Psychology ===

== Withdrawing Projection: An Example ==

== Why People Resist Libertarianism ==

=== Resistance To Truth ===

=== The Rational Fear Of Truth ===

=== Anger In The Face Of Truth ===

=== Levelling ===

=== The Fear Of Others ===

== On A Personal Note ==

=== Psychology An Me ===

== Rational Libertarians ==

=== The Company One Keeps ===

=== A Universal Contradiction? ===

== Empiricism And This Book ==

== We Can Only Hope We Are Screwing Up ==

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}

Book:Achieving Freedom

2010-11-30T07:51:30Z

Anarchei: Split page into parts

'''''Achieving Freedom''''' is a book by [[Stefan Molyneux]]. It was preceded by ''[[Everyday Anarchy]]'' and ''[[Practical Anarchy]]''. Only the first part of the book has been released so far.

== Contents ==
*[[Achieving Freedom/1|How (Not) To Achieve Freedom]]
*[[Achieving Freedom/2|Root Causes]]

== External links ==
*[http://www.fdrurl.com/HNTAFPDF Digital version]
*[http://fdrurl.com/HNTAF Audio version]

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Writings of Stefan Molyneux]]

Book:Achieving Freedom/1

2010-11-30T07:44:19Z

Anarchei: Forgot notes section

{{header
| title = [[Achieving Freedom]]
| author = Stefan Molyneux
| year = 2008
| section = How (Not) To Achieve Freedom
| previous = [[Achieving Freedom|Article]]
| next = [[Achieving Freedom/2|Root Causes]]
| notes =
}}
{{rightTOC|width=25%}}

Before we start talking about how to achieve a stateless society, I think that it is important to spend some time talking about how not to achieve a stateless society.

For the past several hundred years – really since the late eighteenth century – intellectuals, priests, philosophers, academics, and activists of every stripe and hue have been striving with all their considerable intellectual and moral might to place theoretical and practical limits upon the power of the state.

The original American experiment was at least intellectually founded upon the ideal of creating a government by and for the people, with the express knowledge that the state was a dangerous servant and a terrible master.

It is hard to think of other examples in history where so many checks and balances were placed upon centralised political power – and it is also impossible to think of a more dangerous and powerful government than the modern American leviathan.

The abysmal failure of such a noble experiment should give all moralists pause.

If the smallest possible government has grown into the largest conceivable government – within a few hundred years – it is hard to imagine what kind of theoretical system could conceivably control state growth in the future.

== Triple Treat ==
Traditionally, three approaches have been taken to reducing the power and size of the state. The first is political action, the second is academic education, the third is religious partnership.

=== Political Action ===
This approach takes as its fundamental axiom the idea that if the general citizens were educated enough, motivated enough, and insistent enough, then the natural democratic process would shrink the size and power of the state. Candidates such as Ron Paul would gain enough of a popular mandate to stride into Washington, wrestle the entrenched special interest groups, flush out the sewage of accumulated corruption, and take back the government for the people!

To this end, libertarians of all persuasions have either directly participated in or supported the pursuit of political action, usually from a grass-roots level. The political process is considered either to be a practical way of gaining – and thus diminishing – political power, or at the very least a “bully pulpit” from which to communicate to a wider audience the libertarian ideals of small government.

=== Academic Education ===
This second approach – often allied with the political approach – is based on the belief that if knowledge about the efficiency and virtue of the free market can be researched, peer-reviewed, published, and communicated clearly and widely enough, the general population will forsake their desire for statist solutions to complex social problems in favour of voluntary and free market solutions. In a similar manner to the political approach, the growth in state power is perceived to result from a deficiency in knowledge among the general population about the free market – just as the political approach assumes that state power increases as a result of a deficiency of political knowledge among the general population, such as a detailed understanding of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and so on.

=== Religious Partnership ===
At the true heart of the libertarian movement, however, sits a well-worn altar. Religious faith is the very bedrock of the anti-government movement – in particular, the anti-Federal movement. Ron Paul is a fundamentalist Christian who rejects evolution, the Mises Institute is specifically Catholic, Bob Barr is also a fundamentalist Christian...<ref>At a purely anecdotal level, I have also co-hosted dozens of libertarian talk shows, and almost every caller has been a fundamentalist Christian.</ref>

It is not exactly that the libertarian movement is populated by fundamentalists, but rather that libertarianism can be considered an off-shoot of Christian fundamentalism.<ref>Although it is true that several prominent libertarians are atheists, they regularly praise religion for its contributions to freedom, or avoid the topic in general. For an example of this, please see: http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block103.html</ref>

== Follow The... ==
What these three approaches have in common, of course, is money. Political activism raises tens of millions of dollars in an election cycle – while free-market academic economists take home an income in the six figures, along with tenure, months off in the summer, plenty of travel, and extended sabbatical leaves.

However, the real money in libertarian circles comes from religion. Religious organisations raise billions of dollars a year, and are happy to spend that money funding compatible causes. Americans gave an estimated ninety-three billion dollars to religious organisations in 2005.<ref>http://www.generousgiving.org/page.asp?sec=4&page=161</ref> A large proportion of that money is dedicated to the pursuit of religious goals – one of which is the shrinking of the Federal government through libertarian activism.

The only way that this money can be gotten a hold of is through the perception – well reinforced by libertarians – that not only are these three approaches effective in reducing the power of the state, but they are in fact the most effective approaches.

== The Track Record ==
It hardly seems premature to compare the goals of libertarianism<ref>In this book, I will be using the word ‘libertarianism’ to apply to the three central strategies described above. Where I wish to be more specific, I will attach an appropriate word or phrase, such as “political libertarianism.”</ref> to its actual achievements. This scarcely violates the basic principles of libertarianism, as it claims to be a logical and empirical approach to determining truth and value in the world.

One of the central libertarian arguments against statist solutions is that they promise endless benefits, but deliver endless disasters. “Look at the welfare state!” libertarians pontificate. “It promised to reduce poverty, but since it has been instituted, poverty has only gotten worse!”

Similarly, libertarians say, governments claim to protect their citizens, while in fact continually attacking their persons and property.

Thus libertarianism rejects theoretical proclamations in favour of tangible, real world empirical evidence.

To be sure, this is not the only criticism that libertarians level toward statism – what I call the argument from effect – they also use the argument from morality, rightly condemning the use of force by the state to achieve its ends.

However, since an enormous amount of libertarian literature exists criticising the “law of unintended consequences,” or the ill effects of state power – the ever-growing gap between what is promised and what is achieved – I think it is more than fair to take the criticisms that libertarianism applies so liberally to everything else and apply them to libertarianism itself.

=== Achieving Goals ===
Libertarianism does not present itself as a philosophy or activist approach that is designed to merely slow down the potential growth of the state. Libertarianism has as its stated goal the reduction of the size and power of the state.

The formal modern political libertarian movement was founded in the early 1970s – but we can go a lot further back in terms of anti-state activism. In the late eighteenth century Adam Smith argued strenuously against tariffs, the manipulation of currency, and the interference in trade that was a staple of the government programs of the day.

In the nineteenth century, we saw the rise of classical liberalism, which was even more assertive in its goal and expectation of reducing the size and power of the state.

Starting in the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises wrote powerful tracts against socialism, and was the first to detail the calculation problem, which is that socialist economies inevitably fail to optimise because the absence of the free market mechanism of price always results in disastrous errors in resource allocations.

In the 1950s and 1960s, libertarianism received significant boosts on the academic, political, and artistic fronts through the rising popularity of several star economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, politicians such as Barry Goldwater – as well as through the novels of Ayn Rand, which introduced millions of people to the philosophy of liberty.

On the fringes, Murray Rothbard published important academic works on the causes of the Great Depression, thundered powerfully against the irrationalities and predations of state power, experimented with various political alliances with leftists, and spearheaded the examination of how a modern society could function in the complete absence of the state.

The rise of the Chicago School of economics provided a significant academic boost to our theoretical understanding of how free markets work, and why they are so effective.

Tens of millions of people have devoted staggering amounts of time, money, and energy to the goal of reducing state power. This goal has been pursued for hundreds of years, has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars, and has received significant intellectual support from religious leaders, academics, and popular writers.

What has been the net result of centuries of strenuous effort to reduce the size and power of the state?

The largest and most powerful governments in the history of mankind.

Is it entirely unfair to take the charges that libertarians hurl at statist bureaucracies, and turn them against the effectiveness of libertarianism itself?

If a statist bureaucracy should be roundly and endlessly condemned for achieving the exact opposite of its stated goals – and refusing to change its approach despite that basic reality – can we not reasonably level that same charge at libertarianism as well?

The age of the modern welfare state can be measured in decades – the history of libertarianism goes back centuries – and yet libertarians condemn the welfare state for failing to achieve its goals, while creating endless excuses for their own failures.

=== Show Me The Money ===
Libertarians also condemn the state for using moral principles as a mere cover for base money-grubbing. “The government says that it wants to help the poor, but really it just wants to increase your taxes!”
The use of ethical arguments to bamboozle money out of the gullible is considered a vile crime by libertarians – yet their consistent failure to achieve anything even remotely close to their stated objectives is not considered cause enough to rethink their three basic approaches.

As I will show in this book, rethinking our approach to achieving a stateless society will necessarily harm the direct financial and career interests of those who currently profit from the unholy trinity of libertarian addictions – politics, academics, and religion.

Free market economists constantly tell us that people respond to incentives. Whatever you subsidise increases – and whatever you tax decreases. Libertarians also tell us that statist bureaucracies will never solve the problems they are created to solve, because if the welfare state were to actually eliminate poverty, it would have to disband, throwing everyone within it out of work. It is to the advantage of the welfare state, libertarians and economists tell us, to actually increase the numbers of poor people, since that results in increased funding for anti-poverty programs.<ref>It is true that libertarian organisations are not specifically statist in the way that, say, the Department of Education is, but I shall argue in this book that two of the approaches that are taken require the state. This is easy to see in the realm of politics – there is no candidacy in the absence of a state – but I will also make the case that statism is the essence of academia as well. Religiosity will be dealt with in a subsequent chapter.</ref>

It is interesting to note that these esteemed thinkers do not say that everyone except libertarians responds to incentives – thus we can reasonably assume that libertarian organisations are subject to the same economic principles as every other group. If the funding of libertarian groups increases as the size of the state increases, then we can reasonably assume that those who run libertarian groups are actually being paid to increase the size of the state – just as the heads of welfare agencies are paid to increase the numbers of the poor.

I understand and accept that these are not conscious motives – any more than some welfare czar wakes up every morning, rubs his well-oiled moustache, and giggles with glee at the reality that creating more poor people expands his political empire. It is not through the malevolence or bad intent of any particular individuals that such things come to pass, but rather it is an inevitable law of economics, since people respond to incentives.

I do not speak theoretically here – without a doubt, the largest political campaign in libertarian history was the Ron Paul candidacy, which raised over twenty million dollars, at a time when the growth of state power was considered the most dangerous. As the size and power of the state grows, so does the money and attention rolling into libertarianism.

Perhaps you feel that this charge is unreasonable, or even shocking?

Perhaps. However, there is a simple empirical test.

Libertarians would be able to easily destroy any charge of corruption by simply and honestly reviewing and examining their catastrophic failures over the past few decades – let alone the past few centuries.
Sadly, however, not only is such self-criticism and self-examination not part of the movement – it is actively avoided and attacked if it ever dares to raise its head.

If libertarians genuinely believe that they themselves are immune to financial incentives, then they are saying that they are excluded from a founding principle of economics. If libertarians can pursue their primary goal in opposition to economic incentives, then surely this would be possible for statist bureaucracies as well. If those who inhabit statist bureaucracies always follow their economic incentives, then surely that same law must apply to libertarians as well.

When an organisation consistently achieves the exact opposite of its stated goals, refuses to examine or change its strategy, continually takes in more money the worse things get, and attacks anyone who questions its fundamental approaches, then by any reasonable standard that organisation has become irredeemably corrupt, and must be abandoned by the sane and rational – or at least those to whom the reduction of state power is a real goal, and not just a bait for income.

== Reasonable Alternatives ==
I have always believed that it is not particularly productive to criticise without providing an alternative. I have never wanted to be an “armchair quarterback” who complains about the decisions and actions of others, and yet remains unwilling to rouse themselves to create a reasonable solution.

I have strong opinions about how we can truly begin to build a road to a better and freer future – but first I know that the political, academic, and religious addictions of libertarianism must be shed in order for us to begin down that road.

You have to clear the rubble before building anew.

== Unreasonable Compromises ==
Libertarianism claims to be a true, rational, and empirical discipline. “We should oppose state power, and believe in the virtue and efficacy of the free market not as articles of faith,” sayeth the libertarians, “but because these tenets have been proven both theoretically and empirically.”

As an empirical discipline, libertarianism fully recognises the reality that theory must bow to evidence. Material facts trump theoretical perfection.

It is strange – and generally seems almost inevitable – that empirical disciplines, particularly in the social sciences, seem to be virulently opposed to their own standards. Libertarians say that socialism is illogical in theory, and disastrous in practice – and also preach that anything which is disastrous in practice must by definition be illogical in theory as well. In other words, it is equally valid to predict disastrous consequences by proving that a theory is illogical – as well as to derive the illogic of a theory by starting with its disastrous consequences.

It is not unreasonable to apply the term “disastrous consequences” to a movement that has not only failed to achieve its stated goals over several centuries, but has watched the exact opposite of its stated goals come to pass, despite a titanic expenditure of labour, money, and time. If the illogic of socialism can at least in part be proven by the disasters of its application, then surely we must admit the possibility that there might be something wrong with libertarian tactics – the approaches of politics, academics, and religiosity.

== Politics ==
As any entrepreneur knows, the great temptation when wooing potential investors is the desire to over-promise results. In my own business career, I was constantly fighting to ensure that the information that we presented to potential investors was a reasonable appraisal of our capacities and prospects, while other executives sometimes seemed more prone to the temptation of inflating expectations.

Entrepreneurs who over-promise almost always end up under-delivering relative to the expectations of investors. The sleazy fall-back position when this inevitably occurs is to mumble something about “market positioning,” and say that the money was spent not in the generation of immediate profit, but rather in the general “education” of the potential market about the value of the product and/or the company. However, when investors press the entrepreneurs to provide evidence of this “market education,” only vague generalities and baseless assumptions can be heard.

In the recent Ron Paul campaign, two general arguments were used to get as much money as possible out of potential donators, which followed the same sleazy pattern described above.

=== Success! ===
When potential donators were contacted, it was with the promise that their donations would pave the way to potential electoral success. Various scenarios were put forward as to how Ron Paul could gain the presidency.

=== Market Positioning! ===
When the practical impossibility of this was pointed out, the fall-back position was that the Ron Paul candidacy was effective because of its opportunity to educate the general public. There is no podium like a presidential race, it was said, and no better way to get libertarian messages across in the general media.

=== No Testing! ===
Libertarians constantly criticise state agencies for failing to create predictable tests for success, to track progress, and to produce measurable results. If the goal of the Ron Paul candidacy was to get him elected to the White House, then that goal utterly failed. Short of spontaneous combustion, a worse failure could not be imagined.

If, however, the goal was to educate people to a greater understanding and appreciation of libertarian ideas and ideals, then we have absolutely no way of knowing whether or not this goal was achieved, because no “before and after” surveys were conducted.

It would be relatively easy – and inexpensive – to set up phone interviews with randomly-selected American voters before and after the campaign, to figure out how their general perception of libertarian ideals changed as a result of the Ron Paul candidacy.

This was never done – by a group that endlessly attacks the government for its “lack of accountability.”

Of course, endless anecdotal “evidence” is trotted out to “prove” that the candidacy resulted in an increase in the number of libertarian devotees, but that means about as much to a sceptic as a government commercial “proving” the virtue of the welfare state by talking to some people who have benefited from its largesse, and interviewing a department head.

Libertarians – particularly those enamoured by free-market economics – constantly talk about the need to keep our focus on the “hidden costs” rather than the “visible benefits.” If the government promotes a job creation program by showing a number of happy workers talking about how they got jobs through this program, the first thing that the libertarian will do is loudly proclaim that we should really focus on the many jobs that were lost as a result of increased taxation, rather than the few jobs that were created by the government program!

In exactly the same situation, when the silly anecdotes about Ron Paul “converts” are trotted out, and a reasonable person mentions that we should also think about the number of people who were turned off libertarianism by Ron Paul – by his religious fundamentalism, his opposition to evolution, his hostility towards and desire to deport “illegal immigrants” – well, suddenly the entire principle is reversed, and no, we must focus entirely on the positive anecdotes, not the negative possibilities!

It is truly, truly sad – but also inevitable, when dogmatic assertions are substituted for reason and evidence.

It is also inevitably the case that when people are afraid that they have failed, they tend to resist testing. Libertarians constantly rail against the fact that public schools refuse to submit to objective measures of success – and then, when someone suggests that they should measure the objective success that is claimed for the educational power of the Ron Paul candidacy, well, that is absolutely wrong, and a waste of resources, and not to be allowed!

== Academia ==
Truly the strangest beast in the libertarian landscape is the free-market academic – the person who endlessly praises the ethics and quality of the free market, while themselves staying as far as humanly possible away from it!

Such a creature will always tell you that they have joined academia – despite its entirely statist and unionised nature – because they want to help the world achieve freedom by preaching free-market economics to impressionable students.

“Someone has to teach these kids about economics, and it is better for an Austrian economist to hold the position rather than some hideous statist or Keynesian. At least when I am up on the podium, these kids get exposed to some free-market ideas, which they can then further study, discuss, and understand on their own for the rest of their lives. Also, some of the kids that I teach will end up going on to become economics professors themselves, which will further spread free-market ideas to other impressionable youngsters. And so, the world will become freer over time...”

This compelling fairytale is exactly the kind of self-serving propaganda that you would expect coming out of the head of any government agency.

Why is this position so ludicrous?

This argument rests on the belief that great good can be achieved from within the bowels of corrupt privilege. The position of “professor” can only be obtained by joining a state-sanctioned and state-protected union, an enforced monopoly with high and violent barriers to entry. The university system itself is highly subsidised by the state – a less free-market environment can scarcely be conceived outside of pure communism.

If a free-market economist can achieve great virtue and do wonderfully good deeds despite being embedded in a violent and corrupt environment, then surely the same can occur in any government agency, or any state-enforced or state-subsidised monopoly. Violence and corruption can lead to great good, if only the right people can be put in place – is that not the fundamental delusion of statism?

Free-market economists dislike statist monopolies because they are immune from market forces, which they claim results in poor quality, shoddy service, endless inefficiencies, and the wholesale destruction of physical and intellectual capital. Also, because such a monopoly does not rely on its customers for its income, but rather upon its political connections, economists recognise that its real “customers” are not the end consumers of its products or services, but rather the political masters who control its fate.

Since free-market economists do not gain their salaries from their students, but rather from the approval of other academics, bureaucrats and politicians, we can assume that the universal principles that they apply to other statist monopolies also apply to their own. In accordance with their own free-market principles, an academic economist dooms themselves to a life of pitiful quality, shoddy service, endless inefficiencies, and the wholesale destruction of intellectual capital – in this case, the tender and trusting minds of their students.

If this rule does not apply to themselves – if they can provide quality and do good despite their coercive monopoly – then they have no right to criticise other coercive monopolies, but rather should abandon such principled objections, and say that such systems can work beautifully, if only they can be populated by the “right” people. In other words, it is not the system itself that they are criticising, but rather the inhabitants of that system – thus falling prey to the endless delusion that some people are immune to the economic absolute of responding to incentives, and so it is those people who can productively use the power of the state to benefit the world.

=== Actions Versus Words ===
It has been my strong and direct experience that people do not in fact judge what you say, but rather what you do. Ninety percent of communication is non-verbal.

What is your average uninformed student to make of their free-market economist professor? Let us call this tender student “Bob,” and his professor “Doug.”

When Doug endlessly expounds upon the evils and inefficiencies of statist monopolies, what is Bob to think? Is Doug saying that he, Doug, is both evil and inefficient? If Doug is not evil and inefficient, then statist monopolies cannot by definition be evil and inefficient, since Doug belongs to one.

What about when Doug talks about the loss of quality that arises from artificial and violent barriers to competition in trade and services? Does not Doug’s state-protected union at least imply an artificial and coercive barrier to competition? Does that mean that Doug’s teaching is of a pitiful quality, as a result of these barriers to competition?

When Doug praises the efficiencies and virtues of the free-market, what is Bob to make of these assertions? Would he not feel similar to how he would feel if one of his professors endlessly praised the virtues of tolerance and multiculturalism, and then withdrew in the evening to a gated community where minorities were not allowed?

Even more fundamentally – and importantly – what does Bob really think will happen if he brings these perfectly valid and sensible questions to the attention of Professor Doug? If the criticisms that our friend the free-market academic brings to bear on others can be even more directly applied to himself – since he claims to possess such great knowledge about these matters – what will happen if Bob persists in applying the same criticisms to Professor Doug?

All students who are not functionally retarded understand exactly what will happen if this matter is pressed. The pettiness and vitriol of these foolish professors will erupt like a vicious and acidic geyser. Professors are widely considered to be touchy, superior, evasive – and emotionally volatile, as are all fundamental hypocrites.

=== Academic Voluntarism ===
Free-market academics will often say that they did not invent the system they are forced to inhabit in order to teach economics. This is true, of course, but it is hard to see the relevance of this obvious fact.
First of all, the same argument could be made for every single other special interest group that free-market academics oppose.

Secondly, the whole point of a peaceful revolution of ideas is to teach people to voluntarily forgo the evil material advantages of state power. Academics have all the power that they need to overturn their own unjust privileges – they merely have to get together and decide to voluntarily cancel all of their own statist contracts with the universities.

If this turns out to be impossible, or impractical, then all that these free-market voluntarists have to do is go on strike until the universities cancel those contracts for them.

If we see those who most love and understand the free market recoil from giving up their unjust government privileges, then we can at last understand that education alone breeds neither virtue nor integrity – but, almost inevitably, stimulates only the corrosive spectacle of pompous hypocrisy.

=== Do As I Say, Not As I Do ===
When a someone screams at their child, “Never scream at others!” they are in fact giving good advice, but are utterly discrediting that advice through their own actions.

When libertarian academics say that they are largely driven by the motive to teach the principles of freedom to their students, it is reasonable to ask two questions:
*Are they in fact communicating the value of freedom?
*What is the evidence that decades or centuries of using statist institutions to teach people about the free market has increased society’s respect as a whole for the free market?

There is no more subtle and powerful way to discredit an idea than to teach its value in theory while rejecting it in practice. This “credibility gap” is easy to see in politicians, who sometimes rail against homosexuality while cruising for gay sex in airport bathrooms. Can you imagine receiving a lecture on the evils of gay marriage from a married gay couple? Would this not be a form of absurdity rather than education?

Even if we consider it somehow reasonable for pro-market academics to teach the virtues and efficiencies of open competition while hiding behind the black walls of state privilege, should this not be a topic that they openly address up front? If a gay married couple lectures you about the evils of gay marriage without even mentioning the completely obvious fact that they are both gay and married – would this not be baffling and annoying beyond words?

You may have heard the old saying, “I cannot hear what you are saying over what you are doing” – and it is hard to imagine a situation it applies to more than state-protected academics teaching students about the evils of state protection, and the endless moral and practical values of the voluntary free-market.

=== The Price Of Academics ===
Economics is all about empirical measurement and rational theorising – primarily, it is about the empirical measurement of price, as reflected in voluntary transactions.

Since free-market economists base the value of their field on the primacy of empirical measurement, it is hard to understand why studies of students who have taken economics courses regularly show that they actually do worse on economics questions a year after their course than people who have never taken a course on economics.<ref>For more details on this, please see: http://www.robert-h-frank.com/PDFs/ES.9.1.05.pdf</ref>

An economist bases his professional credibility on avoiding arbitrary claims, and building his theories from empirical evidence.

When free-market economists constantly trumpet their own wonderful abilities to teach students about the value and virtue of the free-market, it is hard to understand why studies prove the exact opposite.
I do not have a problem with people making baseless claims, as long as they are willing to at least look for the evidence to support those claims – even after the fact. Economists have been saying for decades that they enter into academia in order to teach students the value of the free-market. However, I have never seen one study – credible or otherwise – which even remotely supports this claim.

Once again, we see arbitrary, self-congratulatory assertions combined with a relentless avoidance of proof. Priests will tell you that prayer works, but will endlessly evade and reject scientific proof to the contrary. Libertarians will endlessly tell you that political action works, but will endlessly evade and reject empirical proof to the contrary.

Free-market academics will tirelessly repeat the mantra that they effectively teach students about the virtue and value of the free-market – yet no libertarian academic study has ever been performed to discover whether this is, or is not, the case.

Free-market economists will study the most arcane and ridiculous subjects – yet mysteriously avoid testing the efficacy of the claims they make about their own profession. They rail against politicians who make wild claims that are unsupported by empirical tests – and then, they tell us that they effectively teach the virtue and value of the free-market, and study every conceivable topic under the sun except the validity of that claim.

Empirically, free-market economists do not effectively teach people about the free-market – in fact, empirically, quite the opposite is true. They actually teach people that free-market values are irrelevant, because they do not live what they preach.

All free-market economists fundamentally teach students is that only hypocrites are drawn to promoting the free-market. Like the gay married couple who tour the country railing against gay marriage, all they do is confuse, frustrate, and alienate those with the misfortune to hear their speeches.

=== Kiss The Ring ===
Libertarians – and free-market economists – roundly condemn politicians for handing out gifts that are not theirs to give. When a politician “grants” a subsidy to a corporation, these lovers of the free-market are very quick to point out that the money is not the politician’s to “give,” since it has been taken from the taxpayer through the threat of violence. We all fully recognise the degree to which those who flock around politicians with the hope of gaining some illicit goodies flatter the vanity and pomposity of those politicians in order to gain their favour.

Ahhh, but how things change when the free-market economist is the one with the gifts to give!

People generally go beyond introductory courses on economics because they want to become professional economists – and many of them want to become professors.

If Bob wants to become an academic professor, he knows the degree to which people have to flatter, bow, and scrape before Professor Doug – since without a “mentor,” he will be unable to make his way up through the ranks toward the Holy Grail of tenure. Bob will have to get research assignments, good grades, recommendations, TA positions – all of the goodies that professors can bestow upon “worthwhile” students.

Someone who is given an unjust privilege very quickly begins to mistake that privilege for their own virtue. Politicians, kings, and bureaucrats are all surrounded by flatterers, toadies, and hangers on – all clamouring to grab a wet meal from the bloody buffet of state power.

And what a tasty meal academia is! Six figure salaries, no shortage of time off, a dozen or so hours of classes a week is considered overtime, it is almost impossible to get fired – it is a wonderfully sweet deal for those who can get a hold of it, assuming that they do not mind selling their souls for the privilege of feeding their bodies.

The reason that professors have any power over their students is because those professors hold the key to a golden door – a key that is not given to them voluntarily, based upon the quality of their teaching as judged by their students, but rather because they have weaselled and toadied their own way up the slick rope of unjust privilege.

Free-market academics hold this unjust and bloody privilege in their hands, and dole it out to the meek, eager, and compliant – spurning and rejecting the strong, the sceptical, and the critical. They thunder their criticisms at politicians for handing out their unjust privileges to a grasping and greedy crowd – and then turn and lord it over their own students, imagining that it is they themselves who are so valuable, rather than the unjust privileges that they can bestow upon those who suitably abase themselves.

For free-market economists, you see – just like everybody else – the trials, stresses, and joys of the free market are always and forever for others – not for those who praise the free market while hiding in the statist monopolies of their ivory towers – but for everyone else, who really should use the productivity of the free market to generate the wealth that can be unjustly “appropriated” by free-market economists.

=== Freedomain Radio ===
It could be argued that becoming an elite educator was at least to some degree very hard to achieve prior to the Internet. Free market economists could not teach in high schools, since there were few if any classes on economics – and it would be very hard to set up a school of economics and try to get paid by offering voluntary lessons to those who were interested.

Free-market economists like to think that people sign up for their classes and submit to their evaluations, because those people love economics, knowledge, and their way of teaching – rather than because they are hoping to use them to gain their way up another rung on the ladder to the riches of tenure. Since these free-market economists love to preach that entrepreneurs should submit their goods and services to the iron discipline of the free market – that value cannot be ascertained in the absence of price, and price cannot be ascertained in the presence of a coercive monopoly – then surely these economists should be eager to learn their true value in the free market.

Since professorial tenure is the unjust privilege of a statist monopoly, it cannot fundamentally be a potential value that an economics professor brings to their students – if this is the case, we must call politicians brilliant entrepreneurs for having so much money to “invest” in businesses.

An economist who truly believes that they are worth their six figure income, short work week, and months off in the summer should be eager to submit their theory to the free market – especially since they insist that everyone else should do just that! When a state monopoly is facing privatisation and open competition in the free market, they applaud such a transition, because it will bring efficiency and reduce coercion – and will thus create much greater value. They tell people who tremble before such a precipice that they should be eager to leap off it to a better, more productive, and more efficient environment. “You will be happier!” they cry. “These transitions are difficult, but they are the inevitable progress of the free-market, the creative destruction inherent to capitalism – and you should be eager and happy despite your fears!”

Well, fortunately, I myself have proven that you can stimulate people’s interest in higher education without holding aloft the false and unjust prizes of marks, reference letters, and tenure!

I have gotten tens of thousands of people interested in philosophy, economics, art, religion, and psychology – and I cannot offer them any career advancement (or even tax receipts)! I cannot offer them a degree, or tenure, or anything else of that sort! In fact, some of the ideas that I talk about can be actively uncomfortable for people, since I aim to take philosophy out of the ivory tower and put it into action in people’s lives, which can be enormously difficult.

So – free-market economists who believe that voluntarism is a virtue, and monopoly is an evil – I invite you to join me on the Wild West of the Internet, the ultimate capitalist frontier! Take your theories out of the tower and let them loose in the streets! Preach from home, preach to your computer, speak your truths to a hungry and waiting world – light up people’s minds with your passion, your knowledge, your wisdom, and your virtue!

It is a simple thing to accomplish. All you have to do is resign from your unjust privilege, and submit the quality of your teaching to the test of the free market you so admire and praise! It costs only a few dollars a month to set up a website and charge people for your lessons. Without the ability to hand out stolen goodies, you will finally see the true value of what it is that you are doing – in the free market, which you say is the sole final arbiter of real value!

You can charge students what they are paying you now – maybe thirty dollars or so for a forty-five minute lesson. It is cheap to set up a payment scheme over the Internet – I will help you for free, all you have to do is contact me through my website. Instead of reaching a few dozen students, over the Internet you can reach thousands, tens of thousands – or more! If you really want to spread the word of the free market to others, and if you are genuinely worth six figures a year for teaching a few dozen students, then imagine how many millions of dollars you can make by teaching tens of thousands of students! Furthermore – now, your lectures evaporate into thin air like water in a desert – with the Internet, your lectures can exist in perpetuity, and people can pay you for lectures that you did last week, last month, or last year!

You can reach tens of thousands of listeners (I have had millions of pod-casts and videos downloaded in a little over two years). Thousands of listeners interested in philosophy talk to each other on the Freedomain Radio board and live chat window. I started the website with virtually nothing, and it cost me maybe fifty dollars a month to begin with – if you charge thirty dollars a lecture, which is what you are charging now, you will be able to make back those monthly costs with less than two students in one class!

When you talk to other people who are nervous about the free market, you always tell them that although the transitions can be difficult, great happiness and productivity lie on the other side of privatisation. When the Soviet Union was going through its wrenching free-market transition, many academic economists went over there, or wrote articles, proclaiming the virtue in struggling through this transition in order to achieve the efficiency and productivity of the free market on the other side.

Academics – free-market academics – surely you understand that it is now time to take your own advice. Surely you have the integrity to live by the standards that you inflict on others. Surely you have not preached a false doctrine for your entire career. Surely you have not “pooh-poohed” other people’s fears of submitting themselves to the discipline of the free-market – only to surrender to your own fears of submitting yourself, your value, to the free market. Surely you have not trumpeted so loudly from the top of your ivory tower that the transition to freedom and voluntarism is a noble goal, and then when such noble action is offered to you, slither down to hide in the bosom of state monopoly protection.

So – this is my encouragement, if, as you say, you really care about transmitting the virtue and value of the free market to impressionable youngsters. You do not want to be the foolish spectacle of the man who says, in matters of extreme importance, “Do as I say, not as I do!” We all recognise that such inveterate hypocrites have been the scourge of society since its inception. You do not want to practice the opposite of the virtues you preach. We have all seen such big-haired monstrosities on the pre-dawn television evangelical hour – you do not want to inhabit such polyester hypocrisy.

No, although it is frightening, as you have constantly pointed out to others, it is a great virtue and a great service to step out of statist protection and submit your goods and services to the discipline of the free-market.

I have paved the way for you, at least. I left a successful entrepreneurial career, and a salary of one hundred sixty thousand dollars a year, to build Freedomain Radio, which was at the time making less than thirty-five thousand a year. And I can tell you that you are completely right – the transition to an even freer market, while difficult, is entirely rewarding.

I listened to your advice.

Will you do the same?

If you genuinely believe that you are worth twenty or thirty dollars an hour per student, then you should leap at the chance to garner your wages from a far wider audience – because people respond to incentives, as you have constantly told us.

If, however, you reject the free market in practice, in your life, and cling to your unjust statist privileges, your oh-so-light work week, your months off in the summer, your paid travel to exotic conferences, your pension, your job security, your unjust prestige – if you tremble to take the medicine you prescribe to others, though you suffer from exactly the same disease, then by all means, sit where you are, enshrined and entombed in your ivory tower – but can you do the rest of us, those of us who are actually trying to educate people in the free market you praise – can you do the rest of us a small favour?
Please – shut up about the free market.

You are an embarrassment.

=== The Contradiction Of Academia ===
The academic approach to libertarianism is founded on the premise that if people know enough about the free market, they will reject statist solutions and pursue free market solutions.

The very existence of free-market academics utterly destroys this premise. We can assume that such academics know the most about the free market – and yet they explicitly reject free market solutions to the problem of higher education!

If someone who has spent most of their life studying the free market wants no part of it when it comes to their own career, then the argument that increased knowledge leads to a desire for more freedom is proven false.

== Religious Affiliations ==
If you want to sail from a city on one continent to a city on another continent, and your course is initially off by only one or two degrees, you may end up not just in the wrong city, but on the wrong continent!

The grand ethics, great strategies, and life arcs of any organisation – or any individual, for that matter – are all determined by the little decisions made at the very beginning of things. It is possible to break free of the fate of prior decisions, but it is a hellish and humbling process.

Modern political libertarianism is almost exclusively a US phenomenon, and the reason is that since its inception, it has been tightly wed to – and dependent upon – the financial support of fundamentalist Christian religious organisations. The United States is the most religious Western democracy – and since libertarianism is an offshoot of fundamentalist Christianity, it is only in the United States that libertarianism has gained any prominence at all.

This was neither innate nor inevitable to libertarianism. Some of the greatest “libertarians” in history have been agnostics, Deists, or outright atheists. Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington – most of the Founding Fathers were scarcely even Christian, let alone “born again” or fundamentalists. Ayn Rand – the writer who brought millions of people to libertarianism – was a strong atheist, as was Murray Rothbard.

However, the great challenge of activism is money. New ideas in particular have trouble gaining financial traction, for the obvious reason that they do not serve anyone’s existing agenda.

People give money to intellectual activists because they agree with the goals of those activists. When libertarianism began, who was it going to get its money from? It did not have the income of an Ayn Rand, or the inheritance of a Rockefeller, and a group of professors do not have the capital to found a sizable political movement.

Fundamentalist Christians believe that the government should be limited because there is no authority but God – the synergy between Christianity and libertarianism in this regard was a terrible temptation, because Christians have a lot of money, which is exactly what libertarianism needed to get its start.

=== Fellow Travellers ===
The temptation to join together with groups whose philosophy is oppositional, but whose goals are similar, is an idiotic pit that philosophical movements seem forever willing to pitch themselves into. In other sciences, we can easily see the foolishness of this approach. A scientific agricultural expert would scarcely benefit from “joining forces” with a Native American rain dancer, although both claim to have the goal of producing better crops. Would we counsel an oncologist to join up with a witch doctor, since both have the “goal” of healing people?

Such advice seems ridiculous, of course, but what if the witch doctors have all the money?

If you have a new idea, you can either attempt to merge it with existing ideas – thus compromising it, but gaining easy momentum – or you can attempt to carve out a new market for your idea. Those who are impatient for “results” will always choose the former; those who are dedicated to the truth at all costs will always choose the latter.

Libertarians were enormously impatient – and we can all surely understand this impatience – and so did not want to take the long, slow, and hard road of carving out a new market for a rational philosophy, but rather took the easy “catapult off a cliff” by joining together with the superstitious irrationality – and deep purse – of Christianity. In so doing, they subverted the movement completely, turning it into just another special interest group.

=== Premises And Conclusions ===
People are emotionally drawn to conclusions, but intellectual integrity must draw us toward reasoning from first principles. Everyone is drawn to the moral conclusion that “murder is wrong,” because we feel so instinctively that it must be the case. Intellectual integrity demands, however, that we attempt to derive this ethical conclusion from first principles and rational arguments.<ref>My solution to this problem is detailed in my free book “University Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics,” which is available at: www.freedomainradio.com/free</ref> To take an extreme example, if the wind blows some sand dunes into the shape of the equation “e=mc2,” we do not grant it a degree in physics. If we imagine an athlete who plays for a team called the “Atoms,” who is asked what matter is composed of – but who mishears the question as “what team do you play for?” – he will reply with the correct syllables, but in no way will have the correct answer.

Libertarians – and other thinkers of course – rightly deride the public-school practice of “teaching the test,” because the regurgitation of rote answers is worse than mere ignorance, since it provides the illusion of knowledge which does not in fact exist. If a teacher instructs her students to write the symbol “4” to the right of the symbols “2+2=” we would not perceive her as having taught the children any knowledge or principles at all.

In the same way, the statement “a smaller state is better” does not indicate any particular knowledge at all, since it is a mere conclusion, rather than an argument from first principles.

In general, if you can teach a parrot to say it, it cannot be considered knowledge.

Coming to the conclusion that matter is composed of atoms as a result of rigorous scientific experiments represents the acquisition of valid knowledge about reality. Blankly stating that matter is composed of atoms because God says so only represents bigoted superstition, and is worse than professing genuine ignorance, since the illusion of an answer almost inevitably prevents further exploration of the question.
When a new, fledgling movement is struggling to gain momentum the temptation to merge with an enormous, well-funded, and well-established movement can be overwhelming. The desire to make a “big splash” and quickly add to one’s numbers and income seems like a perfectly sensible strategy at the time. In a similar manner, a man with a toothache may well think that heroin is the answer – and in a way, with regards to his immediate pain, it certainly is! Unfortunately, the heroin only masks his discomfort, while allowing the rot in his body to fester.
Sadly, by the time he realises that his drug addiction – while it masked his symptoms in the short run – has only added to the disease he was originally trying to combat, he is very likely in “too deep” to stop his compulsive behaviour.

For any cause, money – and its attendant power – can be just such a drug.

Libertarianism claims to be an empirical and rational discipline – the metaphysical and epistemological opposite of any religion, and in particular of fundamentalist Christianity. The fact that both cliques want smaller government has about as much relevance as the fact that both Adolf Hitler and my Indian neighbour like dogs – and gives them about as much in common.

When a supposedly rational movement merges with its opposite based on a shallow similarity of goals, it undermines its own rationality. When the oncologist joins forces with the witch doctor, no one imagines that the witch doctor has suddenly become a scientist – everyone understands that the oncologist has simply become irrational. When the oncologist who has joined up with the witch doctor lectures everyone about the necessity for rationality and empiricism, every sane human being in his audience feels the mad contradiction down to his very toes.

Libertarianism did not make Christianity rational – Christianity simply made libertarianism irrelevant. Libertarianism did not turn Christianity into an empirical science; Christianity turned libertarianism into an irrational superstition.

=== The Tragedy Of Compromise ===
The true tragedy of compromise is that it only benefits the least rational – always at the expense of that which is higher, more logical, more noble, more honourable, and more true.

A noble woman who marries a corrupt and vicious man does not elevate him; she only debases herself – or rather, reveals her own unconscious corruption.

“Compromise” is a standard that is held aloft by the base, as a way of snagging that which is superior and dragging it down.

Impressively rational thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard would laugh out loud at a student who handed in a paper on economics which derived its “proofs” from the Holy Bible, ending with the flourish, “...and so we know that my argument is proven because God says so!” I am sure they would be hard pressed to know even what to say about such a mad submission.

Can we imagine either of these two esteemed thinkers – to take mere examples – clamouring to add their name to such a paper, to be sure that they could share the credit?

Of course not – they would move heaven and earth to avoid association with such madness!

However, when the thesis is “small government is better” – and when millions of dollars are in play – why then, religious bigotry suddenly achieves the holy glow of sublime intellectualism! Suddenly, scholars like Murray Rothbard spend time rooting around the bowels of Christian madness, scrabbling to find superstitious support for free market ideas – as if those ideas are so pitiful and unsupportable that we need to canvas ghosts and goblins for supporting quotes! “My thesis is true because my invisible unicorn Pam has snorted twice in my head!”

This kind of pitiful, money-grubbing desperation is truly stomach-turning, and lies at the real foundation of why libertarianism has had so little effect, and why it stands idly by, communing with ghosts and counting its money, while the world slides towards slavery.

== The Goal - And Soul - Of An Organisation ==
Libertarians fully understand, when looking at statist organisations, the difference between stated goals and actual motives.

For instance, when looking at the war on drugs, libertarians are comfortable saying that although the stated goal is to get rid of drugs, the actual motive is quite the opposite, since actually getting rid of drugs – were this even possible – would end the careers of everyone involved.
No man works tirelessly to destroy his own income – and no organisation is populated by careerists endlessly dedicated to ending their own careers.

When an organisation continues to do that which “does not work,” it is a fairly simple intellectual exercise to understand that no organisation ever consistently does “that which does not work.” If an organisation seems to be continually failing to achieve its stated mission – but refuses to alter its actions – then clearly it is simply achieving another, non-stated mission.

When examining the “evil uncle” of libertarianism – the Federal Reserve – free-market theorists are both gleeful and scathing in puncturing the illusion that it has any interest in actually achieving its stated goal. The stated mission of the Federal Reserve is to create stability both in currency and in the economy as a whole – yet, since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the US dollar has lost over ninety-five percent of its value, and the United States has been wracked by recessions, depressions, and artificial booms. The political complicity of the Federal Reserve has been proven time and again, as it performs a variety of essential services for its political masters, such as pumping up the money supply before elections and so on.

Libertarians repeatedly point out that although the Federal Reserve's stated goal is to stabilise the currency and the economy, it continues to do neither without changing any of its actions – and therefore its stated goal must simply be a “cover” for its actual goal.

Exactly the same criticism can be more than reasonably levelled at libertarianism itself.

What is the goal of modern libertarianism? Clearly it cannot be to win elections, since it consistently fails at that, and has not changed its strategy. It also cannot be to educate the general public, since it has never measured – to my knowledge – the effectiveness of any of its educational campaigns. Any “goal” which has never once been measured in over forty years cannot be considered a “goal” at all.

Is the goal of modern libertarianism to communicate the rational value of empiricism and working from first principles? That is impossible, because it allies with Christianity, which is based on the exact opposite of such philosophical principles.

When examining the true goal of any organisation, all we have to do is look at what has been consistently achieved, rather than what is proclaimed as a purpose. We all understand this in the case of the Federal Reserve – the reality is that the Federal Reserve allows the politically-connected to gain massive wealth and power through the manipulation of currency.

The one goal that has been consistently achieved by modern libertarianism, of course, is a money grab, largely from Christians.

If the goal of libertarianism is to grab Christian money with both hands, then that goal has been consistently achieved. Since that goal is the true goal of the movement, and since it has been consistently achieved, then there is no reason to change strategies.

What is the goal of free market academics? Is it to teach people about the value and power of the free market? Of course not! They could reach far more people by abandoning their tenured positions and teaching over the Internet, or in some other manner. They would also be far more effective as supporters of the free market if they actually deigned to dip their toes into the market system itself, and submitted their value to the arbitration of voluntary price, as they lecture everyone else to do.

No, the goal of such academics is to increase their incomes and live comfortable and secure lives by avoiding the free market as much as possible.

By their actions shall ye know them.

Unfortunately, the enormous corruptions of middle age are bred from the petty compromises of youth – just as the mortal tumours of later life are bred from little cigarettes.

At present, libertarianism has created an income and infrastructure that is utterly dependent upon fundamentalist Christian largesse. Like a corrupt cop with a summer home and a yacht, they have formed their entire lifestyles around a predictable amount of income that flows in from the bulging coffers of the superstitious. This income is a drug that they dare not question, let alone stop taking...

The cracks in the thinking have become the crack in the veins.

== The Addiction ==
Like all addicts, the first defence of libertarianism is denial, the second is hostility. The growth of profitable and self-sustaining intellectual endeavours over the Internet has centrally threatened the moral choices of libertarianism.

I shall mostly speak of my own endeavour here – the philosophy show Freedomain Radio – since that is the one that I am most knowledgeable about.
The power of the Internet to facilitate communication and education has rendered the essentially medieval institution of the University largely redundant – even counter-productive – in the dissemination of new and challenging ideas.

Free market economists know this perfectly well, when they talk about the counter-productivity of laws that make it difficult to fire people. “If you pass a law that makes it difficult to fire someone, all that will happen is that fewer people will get hired.” They point to the high unemployment in France, where termination is very difficult and expensive legally.

If you restrict exit, you also restrict entry – that is a fundamental reality in economics, well known in the profession.

It is also a well-known principle that state controls always lead to more state controls – price controls inevitably lead to subsidies, which inevitably lead to more price controls, and so on.

In the same way, tenure was originally instituted – so the story goes at least – to “protect” professors with radical ideas. Of course, the only reason a statist protection scheme like “tenure” was needed at all was because professors with radical ideas were not already “protected” by their appeal to their students!

A very talented actor can show up to work late and unprepared, and will still get hired, because of his or her appeal to the audience. Laurence Olivier had to put up with Marilyn Monroe being up to six hours late for a movie shoot! Sean Penn can be difficult to work with, but he is popular with audiences, and so his “job security” does not rely upon him being a bland and pleasant person to work with.

In the same way, any “radical” professor need never fear for his job as long as he remains popular with students – assuming, of course, that it is the students who actually pay his salary, as should be the case in the free market.

However, because students do not pay the salaries of their professors – at least, more than a few percentage points, anyway – professors do not maintain their job security by actually being good and popular instructors, but must find some other way to hang onto all the goodies they have come to depend upon.

It is highly instructive that even free market economists did not hit upon the solution of eliminating government funding for universities – thus placing the students at the centre of the economic equation, and guaranteeing that it would actually be the consumer who called the shots, not political connections. No, instead, additional government regulations and controls were called for, just as free-market theory predicted – and which a knowledge of free-market theory in no way impeded.

Since it became almost impossible to fire a tenured professor, what happened was not that radical professors got to keep their jobs, but rather that no more radical professors were ever hired – an inevitable consequence that would be well-known by any competent economist in advance. Department heads in universities obviously do not want to hire difficult, challenging, and annoying colleagues, since they will have to live with that decision – and with such an ogre across the hall – for the next thirty-odd years.

Professors do not have to appeal to their students – I am sure they would experience that as an unbearable humiliation, like any sheltered lords of privilege – but rather they have to appeal to department heads, and other colleagues. This means that no one can really become an economist who challenges other economists to actually live by the values they preach. Such a position would be considered a shockingly rude “attitude,” and would be inevitably punished accordingly.

In this way, the fertility and creativity of free market, consumer-driven competition vanishes from academia, leaving in its wake many who are petty, narcissistic, hyper-political, sneering, vain, insufferable, untouchable little minds, obsessed with minutiae, quick to temper and judgement, emotionally retarded, loftily arcing above the “common people,” congratulating themselves and others for a lifestyle they do not deserve – smug lords of a wealth they have not earned, who spend their waking hours preaching the virtues of voluntarism and discipline while they stuff their soulless bodies with goods and prestige bought and paid for by the blood money dripping from the tables of their political masters.

Unjust privilege corrupts and turns rancid the conscience, which regularly erupts in fits of self-righteous anger against those who have found the strength to make more honourable choices, who have struggled through the close darkness to live a life of sunlit integrity in the mountains above.

== Close Competition ==

=== Methodology Versus Conclusions ===

==== Academia ====
Those who have consistently advocated a methodology are in a far better position to sustain and grow from criticism than those who have confidently advocated a conclusion. The scientist always does better than the dogmatist, because science is a methodology rather than a conclusion, and the dogmatist is only interested in their own conclusions.

Dogmatists are drawn together as a result of their common rejection of methodology. This is why academics, political activists, and fundamentalist Christians all gather together in libertarianism – because all of them fundamentally reject methodology, and instead trumpet conclusions.

Academics reject market review in favour of peer review, which is a fundamental rejection of free-market principles – what Ayn Rand used to call “social metaphysics.” No competent economist would argue that the true value of a product is determined by whether other managers think it is valuable or not – rather, the value of a product is determined by the free exchange of value in a market system.

The value of ideas is determined in the free-market, through the voluntary exchange of value. Ideas have no intrinsic value – since economics rejects the concept of intrinsic value, because value is in the eye of the beholder. Gold only has value because people want it – prior to the rise of humanity and the preference for currency, it was just another metal lying in the ground.

Free-market economists virulently deride the assignment of price by bureaucratic managers in a socialist planned economy, calling it a mere arbitrary assertion of value. However, the same economists praise as noble and scholarly the assignment of value by bureaucratic managers – in other words, peer review – and reject the true free-market assignment of the price of their labour, which would be what students would voluntarily pay them for their knowledge – not for their ability to grant degrees and entrance into academia, but for their knowledge, and the value of their teaching.

This contradictory conclusion – that value is determined by market forces, and yet value is also determined by peer review – is just another one of the endless series of hypocrisies generated by modern academia. The methodology for determining value is free exchange – trade. However, this is steadfastly rejected within academia, because such crass materialism is only for you and me, not for these lords of the intellect. They must be judged by loftier standards, which are the congratulations and conformities they are willing to bestow upon each other.

The methodology of price is thus both affirmed outside academia and rejected within it – the conclusion that academics live by is that their work just has value, damn it – and so they should be paid for it, by any means necessary, including statist protection and subsidies.
This is one example of rejecting a methodology in favour of a conclusion.

==== Religion ====
Clearly, theology utterly rejects methodology in favour of a conclusion – which is that God exists, and priests must be paid.

Religion is so clearly a virus transmitted by culture<ref>Only the first syllable is really relevant in that word!</ref> that no sane person alive would ever imagine that they would grow up to be a Catholic, or a Baptist. or a Protestant, if they had grown up in the wilds of Borneo, among the pygmies, on a desert island – or in a Muslim family, for that matter.

Religion is fundamentally the scar tissue of emotional trauma – a form of post-traumatic stress disorder – which forms around the fears of abandonment and punishment that children experience if they dare to question the superstitions of their elders.

The conclusion is that God exists – and that is the entire methodology, it would seem. Christians sometimes do create enormously convoluted arguments to “prove” the miraculous nature of Christ’s existence<ref>“Would people have gone to their deaths if they had not witnessed miracles?”</ref> – but it does not really matter in practice what reasons are put forward for the existence of God, since whenever those reasons are disproved, more “reasons” are simply generated on the fly.

In ancient times, all roads led to Rome – in the ancient times that have survived to modernity, all “reasoning” leads to God.

If the superstitious were at all interested in truth – which is a process, not a conclusion – then they would begin their questions from first principles, with reference to sense-reality, strict logic, and empirical evidence, just as every other rational pursuit of truth demands.

Of course, this approach is forever rejected, because even the slightest regard for logic and evidence leads one to at least agnosticism. Any reasonable regard for such standards leads one directly to strong atheism, or the explicit rejection of even the possible existence of such things as ghosts, goblins, genies, gods, and gremlins.

The conclusion is the entire point – the “reasoning” (such as it is) is all ex post facto – invented after the fact. Prayer is considered to be efficacious, claim the religious – when scientific evidence repeatedly proves this to be pure nonsense, the story is simply changed, and the requirement for evidence altered or removed.

This pitiful intellectual dishonesty and manipulation – all these pious and smug lies – is the exact opposite of the empirical and rational pursuit of truth. The idea that any scientific or rational discipline can productively unite with this fog of scabrous falsehoods only shows the capacity of the human soul for self-delusion and base greed.

==== Politics ====
When you wish to achieve something unprecedented, it is almost never a good idea to choose from existing “solutions.” If you want to attain a goal that has never before been attained, the only thing that all existing approaches have in common is that they have all failed.

The libertarian goal of attempting to reduce the size and power of the state is an objective that has never been peacefully achieved throughout history. Governments follow the same growth and demise patterns as virulent cancers. First, they mimic the body’s self-defence mechanisms – analogous to initial government offers to “protect” the citizens – and then they quickly gain sufficient strength and power to resist any attempts to contain or control their growth. Eventually, governments – like cancers – metastasise, and grow so rapidly that they overpower the body politic.

Fortunately, society is not the body of a single person, and so when governments grow to the point of virulent self-destruction, their collapse does not end life as a whole, but rather usually – through financial predations and wars – merely bleeds society to within an inch of its life.
Throughout human history, the goal of reducing the size and power of the state has almost always been pursued through either political or military means. Since politics is merely polite violence, this essentially translates into the proposition that we should use violence to reduce the growth of violence.

=== Voting Away The Post Office ===
The political strategy basically runs like this:

If we educate people enough, they will vote for politicians who will get into office and use the power of that office to reduce or eliminate government coercion.

What is almost never mentioned in this formulation is the question of how these libertarian politicians will enforce the reduction of government coercion.

To take an example, imagine that a libertarian politician becomes President and decides to privatise the Post Office. Let us also say that he has a sufficient mandate from the voters to achieve this, and enough congressmen and senators to sponsor the bill and push it through the legislative process.

It does not take much imagination to understand the sequence of events that will be set into motion.

It takes a fair degree of emotional maturity to recognise the basic reality that other people have their own agendas, and will often work hard to maintain their privileges. Libertarians often view the process of privatisation as metaphorically akin to opening a jail – they seem to imagine that the prisoners will cheer and stampede out the front gates, sprinting with all their might to the new horizons of liberty!

Quite the opposite is true, particularly with regard to state industries. Those in state industries view their incomes and careers as just rewards for a life of service and dedication. For them, privatisation is a prison sentence which they will fight with all their might.

The moment that privatisation is even whispered about, the public-sector unions – all of them, since they will recognise the principle in play – will immediately stage massive protests and work stoppages. They will mount legal campaigns to retain their privileges, block major highways, and strangle the provision of essential services. Schools will shut down, power will be interrupted, roads will close – parents will have no place to send their children during the day, and thus will have to take time off work – society as a whole will shut down.

How will the libertarian President deal with this strangulation? Let us say that he wants to open a particular highway that public-sector unions have shut down by parking trucks in the middle of the road. Chanting union workers – men and women, and possibly children as well – ring the trucks. How can this be dealt with? Will he order the police to break through the ring of chanting workers? If they do not use force, then there is a complete stalemate, and the highway remains closed – thus blocking the passage of essential vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances.

The media will have a field day, playing endless images of people dying in stretchers because ambulances are trapped. Photos and videos of riot-geared police squaring off against chanting unarmed workers arm in arm will be spread all over the newspapers and the Internet, under the caption of “Libertarianism in Action.”

Even if all of this mess can somehow be bypassed, the basic reality is that public-sector unions have very strong contracts in place to ensure the maintenance and increase of their pensions and salaries and job security. Does a libertarian political leader tear up those contracts? If so, is he saying that the rule of law does not apply, or that all contracts with the government are effectively null and void?

If all contracts with the government can be voided on a whim, then he will very quickly find that institutional lenders will be reticent to extend credit to his government, and will call in their debts, as per the details of the lending arrangement.

Now, our libertarian hero is in quite a predicament. Society has ground to a halt, tax revenues have declined catastrophically, since the economy has taken a massive blow as a result of him threatening to privatise the post office – and now he finds it much harder to borrow money to make up the shortfall. Governments are very often on the razor’s edge of bankruptcy, sustained in general only by massive amounts of foreign lending. What happens when his new libertarian government runs out of money?

If he is unable to pay the police, or the military, or send out welfare checks, or pay off foreign lenders – what happens to society as a whole? How will people perceive the “success” of this brave new libertarian experiment?

People are rational animals who respond to incentives, and they generally prefer food and shelter in the moment to the achievement of some potential distant ideological objective – and no reasonable person can blame them for this – particularly not libertarians, who make exactly the same choice every day.

Thus people who want to have their children educated, who want to use roads, and receive a pay-cheque, do not have the luxury of waiting for months or years for the problem to be resolved.

Furthermore, the endless images of the violence that will be required to break the power of state unions – just to look at one example – will truly shock and horrify people. Of course, the violence is inherent to statism as it stands, but it is rendered effectively invisible through near universal compliance to the edicts of the rulers. It does not really feel like slavery until a slave tries to escape – and then, most of the other slaves will blame the resulting violence on the one trying to get away.

Finally, since libertarianism is founded on the moral axiom of the non-aggression principle (NAP), can it not be said that a libertarian political leader is initiating the use of force against people who are trying to enforce their legal public-sector union contracts? Certainly a worker who goes on strike is not initiating the use of force; a worker who relies on a legal contract for their pay, pension, and job security is not initiating force when they expect that union contract to be legally upheld – even a worker on a picket line is not initiating the use of force, and neither arguably is the worker who parks their truck on a highway as a protest, since by libertarian standards public roads are essentially unowned, and thus cannot be subject to trespassing rules.

A libertarian leader who uses force against such people is actually violating the NAP, which creates an insurmountable paradox if this leader wishes to claim that he is acting against government power on the basis of the NAP. The initiation of force against non-violent people – particularly when there is no requirement for self-defence – is a violation of the most basic libertarian tenet.

Using the initiation of force to counter the initiation of force is an obvious moral paradox, and one that I have never seen any examination of or solution to in libertarian literature, in almost a quarter-century.

=== Successful Privatisations? ===
Now, it can well be argued that successful privatisations have occurred throughout history, and this is true to some degree, however they tend to either occur in companies that have a prior history with the private sector, and are populated by usually white collar professionals, such as telecommunications companies – or in dire situations where the government has simply run out of money, as was the case with the Soviet Union. I cannot think of a single example of a successful proactive privatisation of a long-established, largely blue-collar public-sector organisation.<ref>Given the involvement of organised crime in these unions, it is scarcely surprising that politicians do not wish to risk their lives and families by attempting privatisation.</ref>

The net result of any libertarian attempt to use the power of the state to reduce the power of the state would be a total loss of confidence in the current government, a sudden election, and a complete, permanent discrediting of libertarian ideals.

=== A Libertarian Majority? ===
It could easily be argued that by the time a Libertarian president is in office, the majority of society will be pro-libertarian, and so will understand and support even the aggressive and violent actions that will be required to shrink the power of the state.

However, this argument fails at a number of levels. First of all, it does not require a large minority to cause untold havoc within society – even if only forty percent of the population is anti-libertarian, we can assume that this large percentage is concentrated in sectors, industries, or unions that are directly or indirectly tied to state power. For instance, a significant majority of public school teachers would very likely be anti-libertarian, since according to free market economists, people respond to incentives, and teachers would stand to lose a lot of unjust benefits should their profession be privatised.

The same would be true with regards to all the other public-sector unions, the military-industrial complex – and all industries dependent to a significant degree upon state largesse.

Not to mention the police.

Just as libertarian academics believe that they can use state power to do good – retain the violent privilege of tenure in order to teach the ideals of voluntarism – so does every other special interest group believe that it can use the power of the state to bring greater virtue to society. Attempting to reason special interest groups out of using state power for material advantage is like attempting to talk a poor person out of cashing in a winning lottery ticket.

Anti-libertarian sentiments tend to be concentrated in those areas where people could do the most damage to society. Thus the fact that a Libertarian President was voted in would in no way ensure that the same percentage of pro-libertarian citizens would be even remotely similar in the public versus the private sectors of the economy.

=== A Millenial Catastrophe ===
If such a program of privatisation were undertaken, libertarianism would become an utterly discredited philosophy for at least several hundred years. For the average non-philosophical population, image trumps argument. The graphic memories and images of the “violence of libertarianism” would remain, for all intents and purposes, permanently embedded in the consciousness of the society.

To take an obvious example of this, just ask the average citizen what he or she thinks of the Industrial Revolution. Almost inevitably, citizens will respond that the Industrial Revolution was a terrible, polluting, child-exploiting time of grim and ever-increasing human misery, which was caused and exacerbated by the greed of the capitalists, and which was only restrained and controlled by the virtues of government.

Or, you can ask people about the Great Depression – and hear a similar reply, which is that the Great Depression was caused by inherent instabilities in the capitalist free market, and was only cured or solved by intense government intervention, climaxing in World War Two.

The fact that all of these perspectives are false – in fact, they are quite the opposite of the truth – has been proven to be completely irrelevant. Libertarians have been attempting to rehabilitate public perceptions of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Depression almost since they occurred, with functionally zero success whatsoever. Once a potent myth becomes embedded in a social environment, it appears to be virtually impossible to dislodge. It seems interesting to me at least that libertarians spend a lot of effort attempting to dispel social mythological falsehoods about economic matters, while completely accepting the social mythological falsehood of religion. This is just another example of how intellectual compromise leads to complete ineffectiveness and moral blindness in practice.

The violations of the non-aggression principle that would be necessary to curb and reduce state power would be endlessly held aloft as examples of the inherent violence in libertarianism. Attempting to resurrect the virtue and value of libertarianism in the future would be about as easy a task as gaining popular acceptance for fascism or Nazism.

=== Reversing Self-Interest ===
As I have argued in a series of videos on Ron Paul, the government exists fundamentally as a social mechanism for the easy and efficient – though of course morally unjust – transfer of wealth and power. The government does not exist to do good, the government does not exist to keep the peace, the government does not exist to protect the citizens, the government does not exist to stabilise the currency, manage the economy, or anything like that.

As libertarians constantly point out – and rightly, I think – that the government exists to grant favours to the friends of those in power, and to punish their enemies.

Attempting to gain control over this evil and violent mechanism, and get it to work against its original and intended purpose of transferring wealth from the productive to the manipulative, is based upon the assumption that it is possible to infiltrate an organisation, and turn it against its core and fundamental purpose.

Surely, if this is proposed as a theory, the best place to practice the theory would be in smaller and more accessible organisations first, rather than attempting to take over the largest, most powerful, most violent, and most mythologised institution in society, which is the government.

Just as we must test medical treatments on mice and rabbits, before putting some vaccine into the water supply for an entire population, we should attempt to prove our theories in more localised and testable environments before attempting near universal application. Even the makers of cereal understand this, and do not launch products into mass consumption without asking smaller and more select groups if they like the taste.

We can only hope that the brilliance of libertarian organisers can at some point in the future begin to approach the marketing knowledge of your average cereal producer – or even your average infant, who seems to be instinctively aware that they must crawl before they can win a gold medal at the Olympics.

Working on more localised groups to establish – or disprove – the viability of a theory that an organisation can be infiltrated and turned against its core purpose would be a huge leap forward in basic empirical rationality for the libertarian movement. This movement, which claims rational empiricism as the basis for its theories, should at the very least – or, to be more precise, as the first order of business – submit its own activist plans to the same rational empiricism.

=== A Modest Proposal ===
If an evil organisation can be infiltrated and turned towards goodness – which is the fundamental libertarian proposal with regards to political action – then there is absolutely no need to “start at the top” and attempt to infiltrate and control the vast, lofty, and endless power of the modern state.

Instead, the theory can be far more effectively and efficiently tested in a local environment.

For instance, libertarians could join the Ku Klux Klan, and attempt to turn it from a racist and white supremacist organisation into an organisation that embraces and promotes multiculturalism.

Alternatively, libertarians could infiltrate the Minutemen, who love to grab guns and patrol the southern borders of the United States, and attempt to turn the organisation into a group that promotes open immigration.

If this is not to the taste of your average atheist libertarian, he could very easily join a local church – surely happy to accept atheists – and attempt to turn it into a secular organisation that promotes atheism. He could join a local Wiccan group and attempt to instil a respect for the scientific method, and a rejection of mysticism and superstition.

What about joining an organisation of psychics, water diviners, and Tarot card readers and getting them to abandon their irrationality and become rational sceptics who speak out against such exploitive silliness?

Conversely, if libertarians prefer to stay within their own sphere, why not join a Christian libertarian group and attempt to turn their members into rational sceptics, who speak out against the primitive superstition of worshipping immortal Jewish zombies?

Clearly, this list could go on and on, and we could have quite a lot of fun promoting a variety of grass-roots approaches to proving the theory that an organisation can be turned against its core purpose – but the reality of course is that we fully understand that all of the above programs would be completely and utterly impossible, and would be a total waste of time, and would achieve nothing except frustration and alienation.

If a rational sceptic joins a group devoted to the pursuit of ghosts and conversations with the dead, they have every right, in a way, to turn to them with surprise, wonder, and more than a little hostility, and ask them what on earth they are doing there!

“If you are so utterly opposed to psychic phenomena, why are you joining a group devoted to the exploration of mind melds with the undead? Surely, instead of attempting to use rational arguments to talk us out of our obviously irrational theories, you should simply join a group that already respects and understands the value of rational empiricism.”

Finally, if you wish to really put this theory to the test, you can take an even more immediate and productive approach, instead of wasting your life trying to turn hateful people in bed sheets into colour-blind lovers of genetic and cultural diversity.

If you truly believe that libertarianism – specifically, political libertarianism – is all about achieving real world results, and that its approach is based upon rational empiricism, why not stand up at the next libertarian meeting, and say something along the lines of the following:

“Dear libertarian brothers and sisters – I am highly concerned that we are pursuing a path which has not been validated according to the rational and empirical methodologies that we value so highly. Instead of attempting to gain control of this massive apparatus called the government, and attempting to turn an organisation that we call fundamentally evil towards goodness, I would like to propose that instead, we attempt to prove and refine our theories by taking over smaller and more local organisations which we call evil, and attempting to turn them towards goodness.

“For instance, we call the government a criminal enterprise, but we believe that we can infiltrate this criminal enterprise and turn it towards more virtuous actions. I would like to test out this theory, and I’m sure that since we all recognise the value of rational empiricism, I am not alone in this belief – and so I propose that we infiltrate our local Mafia, rise up through its ranks, and then, when we are in charge of the Mafia, we can turn it into an arm of the United Way. If this seems like too ambitious a program – and I can tell by the looks on your faces that some of you believe this to be the case – then we do not have to aim quite so high. We believe that we can infiltrate the government and cause it to reduce its use of violence – thus, if we do not believe that we can turn the Mafia into a charitable organisation, we must by our very theory be able to infiltrate the Mafia and cause it to reduce the amount of violence that it inflicts upon the innocent, right? Since we truly believe that we have the power to infiltrate evil organisations and reduce the amount of violence they inflict, we should at least be able to gain control over the Mafia and cut its murder rate in half, say – or reduce by some significant percentage the numbers of kneecaps it breaks. By taking this approach, we shall be able to both prove and refine our theory that an evil organisation can be infiltrated, controlled, and turned against its foundational purpose.

“Now – with the knowledge that we gain by taking over the Mafia, and reducing or eliminating the violence it inflicts, we shall be that much more effective in taking over other institutions within society, that are far more accessible to us than the federal government – institutions which do not rely upon us having to convince tens or hundreds of millions of people to accept our position! Even if we retain as our goal the eventual democratic takeover of the government, imagine how much greater our credibility will be with the average non-libertarian citizen if we can show how effective we are at taking over evil institutions and turning them towards goodness! If we can take over dozens or hundreds or thousands of evil criminal gangs and turn them against violence, we shall gain so much credibility through this process of virtuous reform that we shall be swept into office at the very next election!

“We always tell those in the government that they should attempt to deal with their own problems, before trying to deal with everyone else’s problems. The late great Harry Browne used to say that the politicians in Washington should attempt to at least control and reduce the prevalence of violence within their own city, before telling other cities and other states and other peoples how to live.

“I think that we should take Harry’s advice, and attempt to reform institutions that we have far easier access to than the government, in order to gain credibility and traction and instil confidence in the general population that we have great experience and empirical success in turning evil organisations towards goodness. Once we have proven our power and amazing abilities in these smaller, less evil, and more localised gangs, people will genuinely be able to rationally trust us to take over the government, and turn it towards virtue and goodness. Just as we tell the government to prove its competence and virtue in smaller and more localised settings – particularly those of us who are pro-states rights – so we should also take our own advice, and prove our competence and virtue in reforming evil institutions in smaller and more localised gangs that are infinitely easier to infiltrate and take over, before asking people to trust us with the greatest and most powerful criminal gang the world has ever known!

“I can see by the looks on your faces that you do not think that this is a wise approach, and perhaps you’re right, it could be considered very dangerous, and perhaps we are not quite so confident in our ability to infiltrate and overturn the evils of a criminal gang as we are in our ability to infiltrate and overturn the evils of the largest government in history. No matter, I did anticipate this as a possible objection – though I do think that it shows scant faith in the abilities we claim to possess – and so I have an alternate proposal, which is guaranteed to be virtually risk-free.

“All of us here support the privatisation of the Post Office, and believe that we can achieve that by taking over the evil institution of the government and turning it to more virtuous actions – or at least less evil actions.

“Since we believe in that possibility, and our power to achieve it, I have a far better proposal, which gives us the power to work on privatising the post office without having to muck about with the political process, or rely on tens of millions of people accepting our position, and which will not require a single violation of the non-aggression principle, and which we can start working on today, now, this minute!

“All that we have to do is infiltrate the postal workers Union, take it over, and turn it into an organisation that advocates the privatisation of the post office!

“Can you not feel the thrill of that immediate possibility? We can begin to work towards infiltrating a corrupt organisation and turning it against its core purpose – changing it from a gang dedicated to providing unjust benefits to its members to a noble brotherhood aimed at liberating its workers from the shackles of state power!

“In this way, my brothers and sisters, we do not have to wait for what seems like an eternity for the general social tide to change in our favour, which does not seem to be happening any time soon. Since we already claim to possess the power to infiltrate evil organisations and turn them towards goodness, we do not need to take control of the government in order to privatise the post office, because we can simply infiltrate the post office union directly, and turn it toward goodness!

“Naturally, once we have proven our abilities in this area, there is no end to the amount of virtue and good we can achieve within society – again, without having to wait for the general voting public to catch up with our brilliance and virtue! After we have privatised the post office by using its union, we can move on to the teachers union, and privatise public education using exactly the same methodology! As our successes continue to mount, we will gain a staggering momentum that we can only dream of at the moment. More and more liberty lovers will flock to our successes, since we have broken the paralysis of waiting for the general consensus of democracy! We can set up branches of the movement to infiltrate, take over, and reverse the positions of the unions of road workers, energy workers, welfare agencies – even the police union can be infiltrated, and come out against the enforcement of the Patriot Act, or the seizure of illegal drugs – we can even cause the police union to compel its members to refuse to arrest anyone who violates the tax code – thus effectively ending taxation – all based on our power to reverse the evil tendencies of monopolistic organisations!

“Let us draw up an action plan, and start now! Leap to your feet, brothers and sisters – who is with me?”

What do you think the general response to your proposals will be? Do you think that people will be electrified, leap to their feet, and cheer your proposal, because they genuinely believe that they have the power to turn evil institutions towards goodness?

Of course not.

No matter how stirring your words, and no matter how rational your proposal, your speech will be looked at as a complete non sequitur – in fact, you will be revealed as someone who is unable even to turn the Libertarian party towards a more productive, virtuous, and rational plan. Not only can the Libertarian party never take over the government and turn it towards goodness – you cannot even influence the Libertarian party towards taking a more productive and virtuous path!

We all understand the scornful, frightened, and hostile stares we would receive should we ever stand up at a libertarian gathering and suggest a path of action perfectly consistent with its core principles, but which would actually put those principles to the immediate test.

Making such a speech would be the exact equivalent of attempting to pay a counterfeiter with their own fake bills. They would be trapped, caught, hostile, silenced, and resentful. They would not be able to speak out about the forgery they were forced to accept as a real value, because they were responsible for the forgery in the first place.

This counterfeiter only presents their fake currency to others to bamboozle real values out of them in exchange. However, the moment that they have to act as if their fake currency has real value, they are caught in their own contradiction, but must generate a sickly smile and pretend otherwise.

The moment that you present to libertarians real and practical ways to achieve the goals that they claim they are capable of, all they will do is stare at you in resentment, quickly change the subject, and refuse to talk to you again. Some of them will actually giggle and laugh at your naivety, understanding that you really and fundamentally just do not “get it.”

Why would a group which claims to be so dedicated to turning evil into good recoil from actually putting its abilities to the test?
Why would a counterfeiter who claims that their currency is real recoil from actually accepting it as payment?

Why would you get that resentful stare when you propose to political libertarians an easy and effective way to test the theories they confidently proclaim as proven to others?

Well, it is for the same reason that a priest will stare at you resentfully when you bring to them evidence that prayer does not work.
A priest will tell you that prayer works because their God listens to you, likes you, and will give you goodies, blessings, and positive outcomes. In other words, they claim to be bestowing a real and tangible benefit upon you in return for the money that you give to them.
If you order a book online, and receive only an empty box, and call up the bookseller to complain, and they tell you that the book is in fact there, but you are just having trouble seeing it for some reason, perhaps you should go and see an eye doctor – and they refuse to refund your money, but instead offer to sell you another “book,” is it really so very hard to understand that they are not at all interested in selling you books, but rather only in taking your money?

It is the same way with priests of course. They claim that they can “sell” you the tangible benefits of prayer, but whenever those benefits are proven to be illusory, they reject the evidence, or come up with some other untestable “benefit” that they can provide (entrance to heaven, eternal life, or other such nonsense).

The one constant in religion is not the benefits that are promised, which can change from time to time, but rather that money is always collected. Unlike the capitalist, the priest does not say, “Here are the tangible benefits I will give you in return for your money,” but rather, “What do I have to promise in order to get your money?”

In the same way, libertarians do not say, “I have proven my ability to turn evil organisations towards goodness, and so I ask for your support to expand my powers to include the government.” This would require tangible proof of this miraculous ability, just as promising the benefits of prayer would actually require that those benefits be proven empirically and scientifically, which is quite the opposite of the truth.

When someone sells an unproven “benefit,” and then specifically rejects any empirical proof of this benefit, they are just another petty and vicious con – though in the case of religion and libertarianism, they do not only steal your money, but they also steal the real hope and achievement of freedom in the future that we as a species are capable of.

=== Failure To Act ===
No rational moralist can demand of others that which they are not willing to do themselves.

Libertarians constantly demand that others give up the financial benefits they receive from the state in order to live with greater integrity.
Libertarians, however, consistently refuse to give up the financial benefits they receive from religion in order to live with greater integrity.
Libertarians demand that others give up their illusions about the state, in order to live with greater rationality.

Libertarians, however, continually refuse to give up their illusions about religion in order to live with greater rationality.

Moral hypocrisy always and forever discredits the ethics being preached. This becomes even more true the closer that the ethics are to rational morality. Like a hand approaching a light bulb, the closer a philosophy is to the truth, the greater its hypocritical preachers block and darken the spread of light.

In its current state, libertarianism discredits rational morality more than any other creed.

=== Libertarian Mysticism ===
If you doubt my argument that libertarians avoid proof because they know they cannot provide what they claim, you can easily reproduce this in another scenario. Open up your Yellow Pages to the section on “psychics,” call any one of them up, and offer to pay them one million dollars to prove their psychic ability statistically. There is absolutely no doubt that they will refuse your offer – which naturally makes no sense at all, since they advertise an ability that they claim to possess, and the Amazing Randi has a standing offer to pay one million to anyone who can prove their psychic abilities in a scientific and statistical manner.

If I put an advertisement in the Yellow Pages offering my services as a Greek translator, and someone calls me up and offers me one million dollars if I can prove my ability to speak Greek, surely I should leap at the chance!

If libertarians bring in tens of millions of dollars by claiming they possess the ability to infiltrate evil organisations and turn them towards virtuous actions, and then someone comes along with a practical and immediate proposal to prove their ability to do so, and they steadfastly refuse this test, and feel resentment and hostility towards such a proposal, and then return to promising freedom from the government in return for donations of money, we can all basically understand that this is just a vicious and exploitive con, a false promise of illusory freedom in return for cold cash.

Just as religion promises untestable rewards in the hereafter – and steadfastly avoids any rational tests of its promises – political libertarianism promises a magical future liberation from state power through its ability to infiltrate and overturn the evils of powerful organisations – yet steadfastly resists any rational tests of its promises.

The reason that libertarianism and Christianity are so united is because fundamentally, they are the same. Both cults exploit people’s desire for freedom and virtue for the sake of money, saying whatever is necessary to get that money, changing whatever story they need to change in order to get that money, lying through their teeth, and avoiding empirical tests – claiming the truth and steadfastly evading the requirement for evidence – continuing to claim efficacy despite ever-increasing failures. The whole mess is a disgusting and virulent virus that uses the worst kind of fraud – moral fraud – to sell the hope of real freedom in the future for the sake of petty riches in the present.

It is time that those of us interested in real freedom grew up and stopped believing in pathetic, ridiculous, and exploitive fairy tales.
There is no God. There is no heaven. Jesus is not coming back to save you. Satan does not live in your bedroom closet. We are not evil because a rib-woman listened to a talking snake – and Jesus, if he even existed, was nothing more than an insane epileptic with delusions of grandeur, the product of a primitive and brutal time in our history when endless child abuse, infanticide, and mental illness was the norm.

Gods, ghosts, gremlins, and goblins do not exist.

And political, academic, and religious libertarianism stands in the way of real human freedom. Modern libertarianism is not a hard-to-open door that leads us to a higher mountain of human freedom, but a petty con-game of simple-minded exploitation, a door to a cliff edge that only drops us onto the distant rocks below.

== So - Why Does Libertarianism Exist? ==
Once we begin to understand how not to be free – and how freedom will never be achieved in such a manner – we can begin to understand why people endlessly charge off these cliffs – and we can begin to design a better path, a more productive, rational, and empirically proven path toward human freedom.

We must first understand that we are heading in the wrong direction. When we understand that, we can stop going in the wrong direction, and look at a map. Once we understand the map, and where we actually are in reality, we can begin to plot a path in the right direction.

=== Libertarianism And Exploitation? ===
Unlike religion, libertarianism is not usually inflicted upon helpless and dependent children. It is generally adults who are drawn towards libertarianism – at least from the teenage years onwards.

It cannot be pure propaganda that swells the ranks of political libertarianism, but rather those who get involved in this nonsense must be gaining some benefit.

In other words, when someone donates to the Libertarian cause, what are they really buying?

Are they buying political success? Of course not. Libertarianism has been pathetic in terms of electoral success. Call me a crazy entrepreneur, but I cannot imagine spending tens of millions of dollars on a plan for decades, failing completely to achieve anything even remotely close to my stated goal, and calling it any kind of “success.”

Are they buying the dissemination of libertarian ideals, with the goal of achieving freedom through greater knowledge? Of course not! Not only has this failed, but even the libertarian free-market economists steadfastly reject the freedom of a market economy in favour of clinging to unjust privilege – so even if everyone in the world got a doctorate in free-market economics, the world would only become less free, since an advanced degree in Austrian economics only promotes the pursuit of state unions and the evil protection of an unjust monopoly.

So – what are they buying? When someone donates their time, money, and energies to libertarianism, what do they actually receive in return?

=== Progress And Illusion ===
Why would a priest be able to offer someone the illusion of the love of God that does not exist?

If someone is truly loved, what use would they have for the pretend love of a pretend ghost? That would be like the richest person in the world repeatedly responding to Nigerian email offers of inheritance “payouts” – they already have real money, so why would they want to spend time pretending that fake money was real?

If someone is truly loved by a virtuous companion, and is surrounded by affectionate and trusted friends, what on earth would some otherworldly imaginary ghost have to offer them? People who have enough to eat do not respond to promises of fictitious food; a thin person does not get their stomach stapled, and happy people do not take antidepressants.

A prerequisite for the pursuit of religion is the feeling of being unloved – but we can go even further than that.

If someone feels unloved, but believes that they are lovable, then they are like someone who is currently poor, but believes that they can achieve riches – such a person will not become a thief, because they genuinely believe in their ability to earn money.

A person becomes a thief because they no longer believe they have the ability to make money through the exchange of real value. They steal because they totally lose faith in their ability to earn.

A person becomes interested in the love of ghosts because they feel fundamentally unlovable as they are – the reality is that they cannot be loved, and so it is only through fantasy that they can attempt to replicate the illusion of “love.”

If someone feels that they are unlovable, it is probably for quite a number of good reasons. They may be a liar, or they may be abusive, or addicted to drugs, alcohol, or hyper-sexuality. They might be vain, insecure, self-hating, pompous, creepy, hypocritical, misogynistic, nihilistic – they might be any random handful from the grab bag of human iniquity.

If someone feels that they are unlovable, they have one of three choices.

First, they can accept that they are unlovable, give up their desire for love, and retreat to a life of bitter solitude.

Second, they can change their actions to become more lovable.

Third, they can refuse to either change themselves or give up their desire for love – they can continue to lounge in the squalid pit of their bad habits, but pay someone to pretend to love them.

Given the difficulties of the first two options, most people will pay a lot of money for the third option.

This is the foundation of a good deal of hypocritical and ugly economics in the world.

The desire to gain the fruits of virtue without actually having to go through the trials of becoming virtuous is at the root of massive amounts of financial transactions in the world. The hundred billion dollars a year donated by Americans to churches is just such a payment for approval and “affection” without the necessity of achieving true courage and virtue.

Academics want to have their six-figure salaries without actually having to go through the hellish challenges of submitting their value to the free-market.

Religious addicts want to feel “loved,” needed, and “special” without having to go through the highly challenging process of psychological individuation.

False approval is the emotional heroin of the lazy.

Going to a church for love is like going to a prostitute for love – all it does is make you less lovable – and so more in need of religion.

The purchase of unjust rewards is common to all the three spheres of libertarianism that we talk of here – it is obvious in the religious sphere (“God loves you!”) – how does it show up in the academic sphere?

=== Academics And Theft ===
Psychologists use the term “entitlement” to describe people who strongly believe that they are entitled to that which they are not willing to earn. A mother who does not earn her son’s respect – yet still demands his obedience – feels “entitled” to her authority. Someone who has become poor through laziness feels “entitled” to an income.

Academics feel “entitled” to a six-figure income – and all the other goodies that come with their position – yet strenuously oppose the free market test of value that they so strenuously insist that others submit themselves to.

People steal value when they give up the belief that they can earn it. The academic’s desire to hide behind the high walls of unjust state privilege arises from their certain knowledge that they are decidedly not worth a six figure income, let alone all the other goodies. They know this truth deep in their very bones, in the very bedrock of their soul – yet they refuse to consciously accept it, and so implicitly pursue and support the stolen privilege of state protection.

It is certainly possible for an educator to make six figures or more by teaching people, but that requires a submission to the free choices of their potential consumers. If someone believes that their teaching is economically valuable, they should go and make their fortune on the free market – however, it is a very difficult and sometimes humiliating process to bring that which gives you the greatest joy – and which you believe you are good at – to the general indifference of potential consumers.

A central reality of a free economy is that consumers really do not care about you at all. They do not want to visit your blog, they do not want to download your podcasts, they do not want to interact with you at all – they have their own full lives, with their own self-interests, and they do not care one little bit about you, and what you want. I do not say this as any form of criticism, of course, as there are doubtless ten million entrepreneurs the world over who would love for me to pay attention to them. I simply do not, because my time is limited, and I already have enough of what I want in almost every area.

In particular, it is very humbling to attempt to create a new market – especially in the field of education. If you decide that you want to open a restaurant, then you already know that people have to eat, and often like to eat out, and there are plentiful business models and oodles of information on how to run a successful eatery.

If you are an accountant, and want to set up your own business, you at least know that people need accounting services, and that it is merely a matter of competing with the next person. The same goes for any other traditional profession you could name.

It takes a rather special strength of character to attempt to create a market in an entirely new medium, in a format that people are not used to paying for – and with endless competition from other free media to boot!

Like any artistic medium, attempting to educate combines a deep and personal emotional investment with a near-universal indifference to your product. For those who have not developed much of a strong hide, and the ability to withstand and surmount the humiliation of that indifference, the prospect would seem overwhelmingly daunting.

In particular, the fragile egos of hothouse academics, who have endless students clamouring for their approval, and who cannot be fired, and who barely feel even the slightest whiff of a breeze from the free market – submitting their vanity to the general indifference of market forces would – I am sure – be entirely unbearable.

Thus, why did free-market economists endlessly pursue state protection? Why, in order to avoid puncturing their puffed-up vanity by actually submitting their products to the general indifference of the free market!

Protectionism makes industries weak, economists are always telling us.

The same goes for economists.

=== Libertarianism And Theft ===
Now we can more clearly see what a libertarian adherent is really paying for when they give money to the cause.

What are they really buying?

First of all, we can be certain that your average libertarian is concerned about liberty. At some level – most likely emotional – they do not feel free.

Let us be as generous as possible and assume that this lack of liberty is not psychological in origin. It certainly is more than probable that our libertarian-to-be is not exactly free in their own personal life, and is choosing to project their lack of freedom onto society as a whole, but that is a topic for another time.

Concern about the state of the world, and the future of society, initially shows up as anxiety. All of us in the freedom movement began our journey at least to some degree with a sense of unease about the current state and future direction of the society and world that we live in.
Anxiety is certainly not a universally negative state – we have all felt it in our cars when we fear we might be lost, which is actually a very good thing, because it allows us to turn to our partners and ask which way we should go. Anxiety is an early warning system, designed to help us avoid upcoming dangers, and so should be listened to, respected, understood, and rationally acted upon.

For instance, if someone feels lonely, and unworthy of love, but still wishes to have love in their life, they are going to feel anxiety. That anxiety is going to propel them – if they listen wisely to themselves – into action. A woman who wishes to have children, but remains single in her early thirties, may wake up one day, look in the mirror, and realise that she needs to change something significant in order to get what she wants. This may propel her to look more critically at her own relationships, and the types of men that she gets involved with, and her own history, and her own deepest desires – it can launch her into an entirely productive journey of self-discovery, enriching and deepening her experience of life.

The libertarian-to-be looks at the world and feels growing anxiety at the growing lack of freedom.

In the world as a whole, there exist a large number of organisations that circle the world at low altitude, so to speak, sniffing for pockets of anxiety. When they catch the delicious scent of growing unease, they slowly waft down, perch on the shoulders of the nervous, and whisper a terribly dangerous offer:

“The unease you feel is very real. The world is in a bad state, and it really needs to be fixed,” they murmur seductively. “Give us your money, and we will fix it!”

We can easily see this kind of predatory behaviour on the part of churches – the difference is that churches generally get hold of children, and actively and abusively inflict the unease that the children – as they grow into adulthood – will spend the rest of their lives paying to be “cured” of.

The two ingredients that such corrupt organisations offer to the anxious are (a) a predefined external path of action, and (b) a bill.

=== The Path? ===
If a lonely person comes to a church, the priest will doubtless tell them that they are lonely because they have not accepted God, or Jesus, or Baal, or Allah, or the Seven Shining Paths, or other such fictions.

The priest will then tell the person that in order to cure their loneliness, to alleviate their anxiety, they need to give the priest money, and to do what the priest tells them to do. The priest holds the key to solving their problems – and their obedience and cash will open the door.

This is a mere ritual, which does nothing to actually deal with the underlying anxiety, but distracts and exploits the lonely person, by offering them the comforting illusion that their problem is being dealt with.

=== Libertarian Dentistry ===
If you have a toothache, and you go to a dentist, and he provides you a powder to sniff which will solve the pain of your toothache, and you go home, sniff the powder, and feel wonderful, will you not feel grateful to the dentist for solving your problem without any bloody, unpleasant, and painful surgery? Even though you have friends who repeatedly tell you that painkillers do not solve infections, and that you really need a root canal, you make the choice to “deal” with the pain without having the surgery.

In fact, after making this choice, you start to preach that anyone who submits to dental surgery is an exploited fool who is unnecessarily taking the hard road, probably due to some kind of masochism.

As time goes by, though, you find that your tooth begins to twinge unpleasantly, and so you go back to the dentist, who gives you more white powder, and tells you to sniff twice as much. Magically, your pain goes away – and so you roll your eyes even more when you hear of someone who has undergone painful surgery to correct a toothache.

Unfortunately, as time wears on, your teeth really do begin to hurt, to the point where sometimes even a dangerous amount of powder does little more than blunt the growing pain. The people you know who had the surgery you so scorned are actually doing fine: they are not addicted to medication, and their teeth are healthy.

So you go to another dentist, who examines your teeth and says that half of them are rotten, and a series of very difficult and unpleasant surgeries need to be performed. They also tell you that you will have to stop taking your pain-killers for at least two months before they can operate, otherwise they will interfere with the anaesthetic.

So you go home with good intentions, and throw out all of your white powder. However, in the hours that follow, the most terrible withdrawal symptoms slam repeatedly into your body – vicious migraines, nose bleeds, endless vomiting. The physical pain of withdrawal combines with emotional eruptions of your long-repressed anxiety to produce a physically agonising panic attack, and you literally feel like you are dying.
Pale, shaking, you dig your medication out of the trash and snort some sweet relief. Immediately, the pain subsides and you feel somewhat better...

However, you never are quite able to stay off the cocaine for the two months required to clear it from your system in order to get your teeth fixed. Your life devolves into an endless spiral of pain, decay, and addiction.

This is what happens when you go to a priest rather than a philosopher.

This is what happens when you go for libertarianism rather than self-knowledge.

Sophists will only treat the symptom, not the cause – and so you end up addicted to the treatment, while the underlying cause gets continually worse.

Even more sadly, after a certain amount of time in this addictive spiral, it becomes practically impossible to stop treating the symptoms, because the underlying cause has become too painful.

== Extraordinary Claims, Extraordinary Evidence ==
When someone joins libertarianism, they are gaining a predefined and seemingly-credible path to liberty. If they give the Libertarian Party money, and follows its rules, then they will be taking the most certain, most effective, and most productive steps towards freeing the world.

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – to say that giving money to a political organisation is by far the best and most productive way to free the world is an extraordinary claim when you really think about it. The whole world over, citizens who are interested in controlling the power of the state constantly try to use political activism to reduce its power – and consistently, that power continues to grow.

To put this claim in context, libertarians say that communism will never work, and cite as evidence for that claim the empirical reality that communism consistently fails both economically and politically. If a communist system were found to have high economic growth and great personal liberty, the anti-socialist theories of libertarians and Austrian economists would be entirely thrown into question, since this is considered to be impossible.

However, when the track record of libertarianism itself is subjected to the same scrutiny, you hear the endless excuses from libertarians that you still sometimes hear from Marxists and socialists. When judging an opposing political and economic theory, the consistent failures of that theory are considered proof of its errors. On the other hand, libertarianism must never ever be judged by its universal and consistent failures. Socialism is proven wrong because it never works in practice, because it never achieves the goals it claims – libertarianism, on the other hand, must never be judged by its absolutely abysmal track record of constant, universal, and perpetual failures!

Marxists will always blame factors external to the theory for its consistent and persistent failures. The failures do not indicate fundamental flaws with the theory itself, but rather with specific environmental variables. Communism was supposed to be implemented in an advanced industrial country, Stalin took over communism and corrupted it, Western powers worked against the success of communism, things weren’t as bad as they were portrayed, the system never had a chance – endless excuses are invented to explain away the endless practical failures.

Time and again, with irrational and bigoted ideologies, we see a constant refusal to examine or accept the evidence of failure. Libertarians have the truly astounding gall to criticise government programs for their endless failures – and take those failures as certain evidence of the corruption of the state – yet endlessly ignore and excuse their own endless failures.

'''Libertarian:''' “The government fails everywhere and forever because statism is irrational in theory and evil in practice.”

'''Philosopher:''' “If perpetual failure indicates the irrationality and impracticality of a theory, does that not indicate that libertarianism is an irrational and impractical theory, since it perpetually fails?”

'''Libertarian:''' “Libertarianism does not fail – how can you say that? We educate people!”

'''Philosopher:''' “Well, that is like saying that the government does not fail because it educates children in public school – it does not matter whether you educate people or not, it only matters whether or not you achieve your stated goals, which is a significant reduction in the size and power of the state.”

'''Libertarian:''' “Well, that is a very difficult task, because the government educates the children, and controls the media, and has all this money, and controls the currency, and has all these weapons, and so on and so on.”

'''Philosopher:''' “Ah, but you do not state that government programs fail because of environmental causes, but rather you cited those perpetual failures as evidence of a corrupt and immoral theory. If you can excuse your failures due to environmental reasons, then you cannot condemn government failures for moral or philosophical reasons.”

This is a central reason why libertarianism and statism are locked in an eternal and doomed embrace, because they are identical in the avoidance of responsibility for failure.<ref>I certainly do not mean to imply that libertarianism is morally equivalent to statism; libertarianism does not violate the NAP, while statism is based on such violations.</ref> This externalisation of responsibility is common to all immature and exploitive ideologies – just as it is common to all immature and exploitive people.

Just as governments always blame outside causes for their own failures – capitalists, the free market, the evil Muslims, the nasty drug dealers, and so on – so do libertarians always blame outside causes for their own failures.

=== A Private Sector Example ===
If we look at the Ron Paul campaign, we can see that over twenty million dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours were spent for the ostensible purpose of getting a Libertarian into the White House, or at least creating positive responses to libertarian ideas in the general population.

I would like you to picture working for Microsoft, and asking for twenty million dollars to launch a new product into the American market – let us say that it is a robot called “Paulbot.” Clearly, since you are asking for money from a highly demanding private corporation, your business proposal would have to contain a wide variety of market studies, consumer analyses, and competitive research. You would have to make empirically verifiable predictions about the degree of market penetration you would achieve through your product launch – and you would also have to provide Microsoft detailed and verifiable projections about the return on investment they could expect from the money that they were spending.

The more unusual and novel the product, the more conservative Microsoft would be in its initial investment. You would never get the entire twenty million up front – you would first have to prove your business case in a far smaller environment. You would perhaps get one hundred thousand dollars – at most – to prove the appeal of the product in test markets. Assuming that you were able to achieve your stated goals within that smaller test market, you would begin to slowly get additional funds to expand the marketing program.

If you did not build into the budget of your product release plan any methodologies whatsoever for testing the viability of your initial claims, Microsoft executives would laugh you out of the room, as a rank and foolish amateur who has no idea whatsoever how business actually works. In fact, they would not be entirely amiss to suspect you of nefarious and dishonest motives, by asking for an enormous amount of money that you could spend as you please, without even thinking about providing objective feedback on the success or failure of your program.

This is how things work in the free market. It is enormously telling that a political organisation entirely devoted to the virtues and efficiency of the free market did not do any of the above when raking in tens of millions of dollars for the launch of their own product called Ron Paul.

Those who resist standards of proof are those who know their claims are false. This is the root of the dishonesty at the base of political libertarianism, just as it is in academia and religion. Academics resist the proof of their value by avoiding the free market like the plague; religion avoids the endless proofs against the existence of God; and political libertarianism – that worshipper of the rational discipline of the free market – avoids any proof or measure of the success of its claims.

This is how we know with complete and serene certainty that academics know they are virtually worthless, the religious know that God does not exist, and political libertarianism knows that it is a con-game which can never provide the values it claims.

=== Failure? ===
Of course, we can only really call libertarianism a “failure” if we accept the premise that libertarianism is fundamentally about reducing the power of the state, rather than accepting the truth, which is that libertarianism is fundamentally about promising to reduce the power of the state in return for money – or, to be even more precise, about selling anxious people a way of alleviating their fears without actually having to deal with the root causes.

We will now turn to an examination of the root causes of anxieties around freedom, so that we can begin to build the case for a rational and productive approach to freeing the world.

== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}