Someone Will Rule | 10⧸27⧸25
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Summary
In this episode, Oren talks about the abuse of power by the government, and why we need to be prepared for the possibility of it happening in the future. He discusses the role of government power and how it can be abused.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I am Oren McIntyre.
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Before we get started today, just want to remind you that one of the ways we keep the lights on
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$20 off today. All right guys, today I want to talk a little bit about power and its abuses.
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We all know that government power can be abused, right? This is kind of the core principle of the
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American founding that we need to control the abuse of power. The king has abused his power and we need
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to make sure that that doesn't happen again in the United States, or at least that's kind of the story
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we're told about the amount of American founding at least. And this is very core in the conservative
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DNA, the idea that ultimately we need to figure out ways to restrict government power. But what we
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don't realize is actually we've taken this teaching about government power and we've applied it to
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legitimate authority in things like families and communities and churches and all kinds of other
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spheres of life. And whether conservatives recognize it or not, but by going along with this kind of
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libertarian notion of there should be no authority in these spheres, we ended up moving all of that
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power onto the government. And this has created a serious problem. As much as we hate to admit this,
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the very presence of power cannot be removed. Power will always be conserved. You cannot get rid of
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power. You cannot destroy the one ring of doom. Power will always exist. And the only question is,
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where will it be vested? Who will wield it? And if you invest it properly, then these different types
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of power will push back on each other. But that means we also need to be prepared for the fact that
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if we devolve these powers back down to these different social spheres, they could also be abused.
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That's a difficult thing to understand. Nobody likes to hear that. Abuse of power, especially in some of
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these scenarios, is particularly ugly. And we prefer if there was some kind of super authority that could
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reign over every one of these and objectively decide when someone will or won't be stepping out
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of line with their authority. But true authority, true sovereignty means either these different
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organizations, these different levels of social spheres can make their own decisions or not. And if
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the government can ultimately step in in any of those situations, then none of those spheres are
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ultimately sovereign. Again, very difficult thing to hear, but an important thing we need to
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understand. Because if we give up this understanding of power, then we will inevitably move all of our
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power into the government, whether we grasp that or not. So I want to get into the details of how
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power works, how abuse of power works, how it can be avoided, but to some extent, but ultimately will
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always be tied inherently to the existence of true sovereignty. We'll get into all that in a second,
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All right. So like I said, let's talk first about the nature of power, authority, and their abuses.
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Now, if power exists, then obviously it can be abused. That's basically the nature of power.
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Power is the ability to make one man move, right? The political power is about the ability to tell a man
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to move and he must move. And your ability to do that can obviously be abused. As soon as you have
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authority over someone, the ability to move a man, there is always the possibility that you might use
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it for your own advantage and not someone else's, right? That ultimately the person wielding that
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power is not doing it. They're not telling the man to move because the man is standing under a falling
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anvil or about to be hit by a train, but they're telling that man to move into a position that will
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ultimately harm that individual. And really that is an extricable from the exercise of power.
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And so that's why we know that you have to be careful about who you vest authority in and how
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much authority you vest them with. That is in the minds of many people in America, especially on the
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right or conservatives, that is kind of the main point of the constitution to vest at the minimum
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amount of power possible into the government and divide what power you do give them up to avoid
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its abuses. And of course the mixed constitution, which is what our founders were actually going
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for, right? That there would be elements. A lot of people say, oh, well, you're just kind of a
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democracy or whatever. No, no, not at all. Our mixed constitution, well, the type of constitution that
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was suggested by all kinds of philosophers in antiquity up to our founders was one which mixed some
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elements of monarchy, some elements of aristocracy, and some elements of democracy together,
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right? Aristotle's three main forms, the rule of the one, the rule of the few, and the rule of the
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many, these need to ultimately be represented simultaneously inside our society. And by allowing
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representation from each level of these groups, we can keep one group from ultimately overruling the
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entire thing. We kind of get maybe the best of each of these worlds without the downsides, or at least
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that's the thought. Now, ultimately, when we recognize that we can't get rid of power, that power will be
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vested in one way or another inside of these different places, we have to recognize, again,
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the truth that ultimately it will be abused. Now, one way you can avoid this abuse, and this is the
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way that a lot of people think of our constitution, the way it's supposed to work, is you set power
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against power, right? This is Federalist 51. This is Hamilton talking about the different passions,
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the different ambitions, checking ambition inside the government. That's great, right? That's important.
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But we need to recognize that power does not just exist in the government. Now, the founders knew
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that, and I'll talk about that more in a second. But we have forgotten that there are all kinds of
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levels of power in the society. And if you're obsessed just with government power, you will forget that
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actually it is these outside forces, these non-governmental powers, that are really meant to
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check the power of the government itself. Yes, the branches of the government are great, and the checks and
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balances. Yes, these are all good, right? We want to separate those powers, of course. But that is not
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sufficient to actually hold government power at bay. Because once all the power is pushed up into
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government, then those little ideas about separating the powers and checking and balancing each other,
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they start to break down. Because they're not sufficient to a powerful government that has really
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brought all of society's authority unto itself, right? And this means that all the abuse can just
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occur at a higher level. And this is the classic, what's called the Odysseus problem, right? The
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desire to bind authority. Can you ultimately bind sovereignty? Or is sovereignty ultimately always
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going to have that final say, that final exercise of power? And that's kind of what I wanted to talk
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to you about today. So when we think about these different types of power, these different social
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spheres, I want to talk to you a little bit about Bertrand de Juvenal. If you're playing your Oren
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bingo card at home, you can check the Bertrand de Juvenal box off for today. And Bertrand de Juvenal is
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this French philosopher who talks about the metaphysics of power. And one of the things that de Juvenal says
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is that the only thing that's ever really stopped power is opposing power. Once again, I'll remind you,
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that's not just his creation. That's something that our founders knew as well. That's why they set
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power against power. But de Juvenal wants to zoom out and say, it's not just the government power
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that we need to think about. It's the other social spheres, the spheres of church, the spheres of family,
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the spheres of community, tribe. These are the things that actually control the different powers
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and balance each other inside your society. And the government just becomes one of these many
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spheres of power. So yes, you have state authority, but you have church authority. You have religious
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authority. You have family authority. You have the authority of community and tribe. And each one of
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these has different interests. The power of family is different from the power of community, which is
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different from the power of church, which is different from the power of the state. And so the
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way that they hold these powers, the way that they engender their loyalties, the way that they push back
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against each other, these things are all unique. And because the power is unique and comes from
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different places that are critical to your society, each sphere can only ask for so much.
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The church can only ask for so much. The family can only ask for so much. The tribe can only ask
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for so much. The state can only ask for so much, because if any one of those asks for too much,
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the other critical pillar of society will start to crumble. If you ask for too much in the state,
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then the family is going to start to crumble. The tribe is going to start to crumble. If the church
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asks for too much, then the family might crumble. If any one of these demands too much of the
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individual, then the entire society starts to come apart because they were interconnected
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and essential on levels. The government was not just the be-all and end-all of communal
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authority. And that's what we need to understand. Today, we have this really, really atomistic
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relationship with the state. We, as individuals, interact with this Leviathan state. And this is
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why you see movies like Brazil or stories like 1984 and these people trying to overcome these
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insane technocratic bureaucracies and just failing at every level, right? Because they, as an
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individual, even though they might know something's wrong, they might recognize errors in the system,
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they might wish to be, you know, something else. They, as one person, cannot push away from the
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state. They simply do not have enough power. Collective forces are the only thing that actually
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push back against state power. But if you eliminate all these collective forces, then you end up a
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scenario where you don't have the ability to push back. This is really important because a lot of
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conservatives will frame right and left battles, conservative and liberal battles, in the idea of
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individualism versus collectivism. And that is dumb. That is very dumb. Okay? Yes, there are parts of
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leftism that are toxic collectiveness, right? The communism and these other things, not helpful.
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However, collective action is the only thing that ever gets anything done, including making
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governments smaller. And this is unfortunately why libertarians often fail in their quest to make
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governments smaller because they don't understand this. They think it's all individualism. We're
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individual libertarians, right? So we all have our own notion of what libertarian is. This is the
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problem with libertarians. You get 10 of them in a room and everyone will tell you that the other ones
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don't believe in real libertarianism, but they do, right? Because they have the real libertarianism.
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So it's very difficult for the libertarians to collectivize and push back against power because
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every one of them is trying to define their own special plan. And even though they all know they're
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in opposition to the government at large, it's very difficult for them to then collectively push
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back against it, right? So this is a huge issue. Now, one of the things that guys like Alexis
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de Tocqueville realized was that ultimately it is the voluntary associations in the United States
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that allowed our government to be small. He pointed out that it was the social clubs and the churches
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and the fraternal organizations and the fire departments and like all of these things that
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Americans were constantly volunteering for, they became kind of their own little power centers,
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right? You might think of the fire brigade as no big deal, the voluntary fire brigade, until you
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realize that several influential men of the city are involved in the fire brigade. And actually being a part of
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the fire brigade means you have a certain level of cachet and influence inside and access to power
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through that. And you have access to the power through the fire brigade in a way you don't have
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it if you just go straight to, say, the government. And so this fire brigade acts as kind of like its own
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ad hoc little check against government power because it's not just the government that has the power,
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it's also this fire brigade. The same is true of church, of course. Church should primarily be a place
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where you worship God, but you're naturally going to grow connections there. And everyone knew through
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most of American history that if you wanted to make valuable social connections, you would go to church
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because that's where you met people of influence inside the town and settings that weren't necessarily,
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again, official government functions. And every time you have these voluntary associations,
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you're creating basically little cabals inside your community. We used to call this the old boys network.
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Now, that's a dirty word today because, again, we have this idea that anyone doing power, having power
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outside official government operations is bad, right? But not necessarily. Actually, this is what created
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those pushback against the state controlling all the power because, of course, never did any one of
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these voluntary associations have all the power. Yes, you had the church, but you also had the fire
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brigade and brigade and you had your fraternal organization and you had your community organization,
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your rotary club. All of these things were involuntary associations that created spheres of power
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that could influence government, but were not part of government. And they pushed back against the idea
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that all your effort needed to be in influencing, controlling the operation of the state itself. They also took
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on a lot of duties that the state would later take on. So if the state is feeding you and putting out
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all your fires and personally responsible for your protection and responsible for the education of
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your children and responsible for your health care and everything, well, then the state has all of the
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eggs in its basket, right? There's nothing that these other organizations can do for you that the state
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can't do. But that wasn't available through most of history. There wasn't this level of scale and
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infrastructure that allowed the state to provide all those things. So it had to rely
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on churches. It had to rely on fraternal organizations. It had to have voluntary fire
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brigades because it couldn't fund a military throughout most of history, much less individual
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police forces and fire brigades. In a lot of America, you didn't even have the office of sheriff
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because it was seen as an abusive office from England. Instead, you had a constable. And if the constable
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wanted to make an arrest, he didn't even go to arrest the person by himself. He had to go
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to the men of the city and convince them that this guy needed to be arrested. And then he would go
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with basically a mob to arrest that person. And that was the way that policing was done in that it
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was a community thing. Every man had to be involved. You had to compel these different people,
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these private citizens into public action. And that meant that the office was not really
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something that you could easily abuse, right? This is how you avoided an abuse of power.
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It's not by just dividing the sheriff's power up. No, instead, you had a system where the average
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person had to be directly involved in the action. It wasn't just the state separate. No, if you wanted
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to make this arrest, you needed to bring the rest of the community in and utilize them in order to make
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that happen. But of course, it's not just the voluntary associations, right? It's also the
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involuntary associations. In fact, in many ways, the involuntary associations are even more important.
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I can't break the bonds of family. I can't break the bonds of religion that I was born into. As easy
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as I can, I can just leave my, I don't know, loyalty to Walmart or, you know, some job I'm working at.
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Those voluntary associations, those, you know, the blood and the religion and the tradition and the
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heritage, those things are far more difficult to simply leave behind and break and betray than all
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these, you know, voluntary associations of market and commerce and even loyalty to the state, right?
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And these things are critical because when you have these associations, they are so deeply ingrained
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in human nature and more importantly, so ingrained in human existence, like they are necessary for
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human flourishing, that it's very difficult for people to abandon them for some benefit from the
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state or someone else, right? And this is what really ends up binding government power. Yes, again,
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constitution, division of power, all great, all great, right? But ultimately, it is truly the loyalty to
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these non-voluntary associations and voluntary associations that ultimately is what really
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restricts the state. And it's not just me saying that. That's what Alexis de Tocqueville said. That is
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what Bertrand de Juvenal said. We have a long history of Frenchmen telling Americans about American,
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how America works, but nonetheless, these parts are true.
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So now we need to talk about what is going to be probably the more controversial part or the more
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difficult part, right? So far, we're kind of recapping things we've talked about on the channel
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before bringing them all together, but this part is really critical. So a lot of times people will look
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at these different associations or these, you know, involuntary and voluntary, and they will say,
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well, if they have authority, they could abuse them, right? And we see this, of course, with the
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family, right? We see it with the church. Of course, we can all think of scandals when it comes to
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abuse of children in homes or even, you know, child abuse in churches, though, to be very clear, that is
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much lower, for instance, than abuse in public schools that nobody talks about. But obviously,
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people are more likely to do something like hate a Catholic church than they are to hate a school.
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And to be clear, like, you know, pedophiles should be, well, it's on YouTube, but, you know,
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the Bible has solutions for this problem. I'll just put it that way. You know, millstone futures,
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very bright. So I want to be clear, like, all these abuses are not okay. I'm not justifying them.
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The people who do them should meet a biblical penalty for that crime. But what I'm saying is,
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as long as authority exists inside those institutions, the possibility of abuse will be
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there, right? We simply can't get rid of these two things. If a parent has authority over a child,
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they could abuse the child. If the church has authority over its flock, then someone in the
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flock could be abused by someone in a position of power in the church. It shouldn't happen.
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No parent should ever abuse their child and no church leader or anyone on authority should abuse
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their power inside the flock. I mean, that is, these are the highest of crimes, right? Like,
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these are, again, I believe very staunchly in the severest penalty for them being done
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because they are the deepest betrayal. But the reason they're the deepest betrayal,
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this matters, this really matters. The reason that they are the deepest type of betrayal
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is that ultimately, these are betrayals of true trust, right? Like, the most direct divine
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authority available to us, right? The reason that these are such heinous crimes, some of the worst
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crimes we can imagine, is specifically because those are God's structures in our life. And we know it.
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We know the family and the church are directly divinely ordained. And they are given a sacred duty to watch
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over these children, these parishioners, right? Like, these members of the congregation.
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And so the violation of that relationship, even though, you know, we could think of other abuses
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that are similar in, like, technical sense, somehow those people committing those abuses are the most
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vile. And it's because they are the most divinely ordained positions. And if you can't trust those
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things, you can't trust anything else. And this is why people who are abused as children by parents or
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family members, when they're abused by churches, this is usually the thing that is the most devastating
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to them, right? Like, this is the thing most likely to scar them for life, to make all of their
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relationships terrible, to give them deep psychological conditions, destroy trust. Because
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once those most core relationships are violated, it is very, very difficult for people to regain a normal
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sense of trust, right? And so that's why these have come with some of the most heinous penalties,
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and rightly so. This is why these things are most hated and seen as the greatest betrayal. And again,
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very rightly so. However, we do need to realize something here. And again, very difficult, but very
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true. If a sphere is to be sovereign, then abuse must be a possibility. And that is scary, but it's true.
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If another authority has the ability to step in and override your authority, you are not sovereign.
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That's it. And so that's why there's always a very high standard for any part of society stepping in
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and involving itself in these relationships, right? The parental relationship was considered sacrosanct
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throughout most of history, especially in Western cultures, right? It's very difficult to step in and
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say that you should involve yourself in family affairs. One, because A, it was just very difficult
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for the state to do that. They didn't have the level of scale to involve themselves in every single
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family and hash out their problems, right? However, it was also because these were such sacred
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positions that violating them was seen as extremely taboo. So if you look at something, a lot of people
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will point at the Bible, they'll look at the Old Testament and they'll say, well, there's an injunction
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in the Bible that says you can take your son, you can take your child to the front gates of the city
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and stone them to death, right? You can stone them to death. How barbaric, how barbaric that the Bible
00:23:35.760
has this understanding that you can go in and stone your own child, right? But they need to understand
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that actually, historically, this is quite the revolution. Because in, for instance, the Roman
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understanding, the patriarch was the head of the household. And through much of Roman history,
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until a son or daughter had come of age, they were basically the property of the paterfamilias,
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right? The head male of the house. They could be sold into slavery, they could be beaten, they could be
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killed at the whim of the father. He is the ultimate sovereign inside that family. And that
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means whatever he says, and literally whatever he says, for the most part, goes, right? Very little
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oversight over what a father could or couldn't do to his children, right? When the Bible is establishing
00:24:31.200
this idea that you need to bring the son to the gates of the city, it's walking a fine line. It's
00:24:37.040
saying the authority of the father still exists. However, there are levels of severity that you
00:24:44.840
must prove before the tribe, right? So this is the next step. The tribe becomes the next check on this,
00:24:53.240
right? So you go to the gates of the city, that means the tribal elders, right? And the tribal elders
00:24:59.200
will hear your case against your son. You still have the authority, you're still the head of the
00:25:03.140
household. But the tribal elders need to check this very severe action. And if they agree, then you
00:25:10.300
can take the action that you want. But there is, there is a check on the final step. You still have
00:25:15.420
vast power inside the house as the head of the house is the father. But there is a check, there is a tribal
00:25:21.600
check, right? On whether or not you can ultimately kill your kid. And this is a, again, people look at this
00:25:29.400
as barbaric, but it's not. If you look at, if you actually look at the context, it's quite a change
00:25:34.200
in how families were run and how communities were run and how authority was understood, right? But
00:25:41.360
you'll notice that that authority still just goes to the tribal level. And this is important because
00:25:46.060
these intermediate institutions kept everything from going directly to the state. This was also true
00:25:52.340
if you read a book like Fustel de Colange's The Ancient City. He talks about the ancient Roman
00:25:58.100
and Greek cultures. And he says that ultimately people did not take most of their disputes to the
00:26:04.680
state. It was not the job of the Roman or Greek governments to handle these different problems.
00:26:14.020
If something happened inside your tribe and it couldn't be solved inside the family,
00:26:18.700
you took it to the patrician, the head of the djinn, the person who ran your tribe.
00:26:24.920
And that patrician, that elderly figure, that patriarch, that person was the one that decided
00:26:33.840
what happened, right? They were the first judge. So if you had two people who had a dispute inside a
00:26:40.380
tribe, you couldn't work it out. You take it to not the government, not the state, but to your
00:26:46.840
patriarch. And that patriarch sits in judgment and says, this is what happens. Here's how we
00:26:51.940
dissolve this. If you went directly to the state, this was seen as a serious problem.
00:26:56.960
And this was seen as a huge violation of tradition, of authority, of betrayal, of loyalty,
00:27:02.960
very, very immoral, right? To take this out of its context and take it to the state. And again,
00:27:09.760
this really limits the power of the state because you have this intermediate layer that resolves
00:27:16.360
conflict inside the tribe without taking it to the over state, right? And it's interesting because
00:27:23.940
Colange kind of echoing what would later be DeJuvenal's understanding was that before the
00:27:32.480
different tribes could be forged into a true state and eventually an empire, the power of the
00:27:39.480
families had to be dissolved. They had to get rid out of this idea that the families had the power,
00:27:45.980
that the patriarchs had the power, that the tribes had the power. And they had to move that power into
00:27:51.180
the hands of the different leaders, right? The emperor or the two consuls. You had to strip power
00:27:58.400
away from the families and move it into the state before you could scale up and really become
00:28:02.800
this large government apparatus. So if you want to avoid big government, quote unquote, big government,
00:28:09.680
the thing to do is not to get rid of authority. Authority will exist. Someone will decide. Someone will
00:28:16.940
rule. Someone will rule. The question is, will the state rule or will the families rule? Will the tribes
00:28:26.060
rule? Will the church rule, right? And the answer properly balanced is yes, all of these will rule
00:28:32.260
in their domains. Each in their own place, they will have primacy. And that's what actually keeps
00:28:38.160
the government small. It's not just the division of into branches or the checks and balances, the
00:28:43.860
architecture of the constitution, though that stuff's great. But that's not actually what keeps
00:28:48.560
government small. It's the power of these intermediate authorities. But if the state can step in at any
00:28:54.560
time as it does today with families and say, we have the authority to step in and regulate, not just
00:29:01.080
like really bad child abuse, right? But all kinds of stuff, right? If you don't want to trans your
00:29:07.200
child, states like California will steal your kid from you. So if you don't want to abuse your child,
00:29:12.500
they'll step in and take your child. If you are teaching the wrong religious beliefs, if you don't
00:29:19.840
think your child should go to a government school, the government can step in and take charge, right?
00:29:26.000
Now, in some cases, we feel good about that because, of course, there are abusive parents. Look, I was
00:29:30.380
a public school teacher in one of the worst public schools in my area, the worst public school in my
00:29:36.060
area. And trust me, I know about child abuse. I've unfortunately seen it. I've had to be a part of
00:29:44.720
people reporting it. I am aware of the neglect that ultimately, you know, family members can have.
00:29:51.880
So I don't say this by like, oh, I've just never seen that. That's not a real thing. No, no, no. I
00:29:56.880
know I've got an up close and personal seat to how bad that can be. But ultimately, you have to
00:30:03.500
recognize that if the government is regularly involving themselves in families, those families
00:30:09.020
have lost authority. Now, and I think a lot of these situations, the problem is there is no
00:30:13.520
intermediate authority in these children's lives. There is no wider family connection who can come
00:30:18.740
in and say, look, that father is not taking care of our nephew or our niece, and we need to get
00:30:23.800
involved. Actually, that guy is part of our tribe, and we're not going to let him abuse his children.
00:30:29.480
We're going to step in. Those authorities are now gone. In fact, if someone tries to invest
00:30:34.160
themselves, if an intermediate institution tries to stop child abuse, they could be held viable, right?
00:30:40.080
They could be the one. So you have to give the power to state. The state is the only one who's
00:30:44.640
allowed to step in and stop the family abuse, which means it is the only one with authority. And that
00:30:49.440
means it has the true sovereignty inside every family relationship. Now, this is also true of
00:30:58.300
the church. Now, obviously, I am a Christian. I've been in the church my entire life. I've had a very
00:31:03.740
positive experience with church. However, I do know people who have been abused in church, have
00:31:09.320
been taken advantage of in church. And that is horrific, again, for all the reasons we just
00:31:13.640
talked about at the beginning of this, that this is one of the most sacred relationships that a human
00:31:18.040
being can have. And someone coming in and abusing it is one of the greatest violations, one of the
00:31:22.700
grossest violations we can understand. But one of the things that the Bible says very clearly
00:31:28.540
is that actually most issues should be solved inside the church. It says, don't take a Christian
00:31:35.680
to court. Do not sue another Christian. Do not let a secular agency solve your problems. Do not let
00:31:45.020
the state solve church issues. Much like with the family, you go to the church first. The elders of
00:31:52.340
the church are the ones that decide whether or not there should be discipline, whether there should be an
00:31:57.300
issue. That's where you should go first to resolve that dispute. First, you go to the person, then you
00:32:04.540
go to the church, the wider church body and ask for restitution, ask for this problem to be solved.
00:32:12.320
Now, again, that can be very scary because, of course, churches could abuse their authority. They could
00:32:17.940
gather around and protect an individual instead of turning them over for justice, right? Like that could be
00:32:25.400
a really serious problem inside a church. And yet it is very specifically what the Bible asks us to do.
00:32:33.140
And why? Well, because God recognized that ultimately you needed authority that wasn't state
00:32:39.540
authority. And of course, the church authority can be abused and the state authority can be abused and
00:32:45.280
the family authority can be abused. But when you put the state in judgment of both the church and the
00:32:50.360
family, then you're saying that those don't have sovereignty and you're vesting all of the power in
00:32:55.100
the state. And the problem is that most conservatives would agree with this. They would say, yeah, you
00:33:00.140
should go to the state, go to the police, go, go, go and resolve your problem in court. They would not
00:33:07.140
follow the biblical injunction. Most conservatives agree with this. And they're, they, they agree with
00:33:12.180
this because they're worried that someone will think they're okay with child abuse or something like
00:33:16.780
that. As if the state does not facilitate child abuse. Again, let me tell you, as someone who worked
00:33:21.260
in state agencies, who worked in public schools, the state facilitates plenty of child abuse,
00:33:28.500
plenty of child abuse. The state removing a child from an abusive home often means they just drop them
00:33:33.800
in a new abusive home. Again, more child abuse happens in public schools, even per capita than it does
00:33:40.320
in places like the Catholic church. So public sector government run institutions are rife with
00:33:47.280
abuse. And of course we recognize this. We recognize that government is abusive. We know this. And yet
00:33:52.900
we say this should be the final arbiter, right? Because what we really want, and this is the core
00:33:57.920
of this problem. This is kind of my ultimate point in where I'm going with this is we all want an
00:34:04.040
authority outside the current authority to resolve our problems without the interest of that authority,
00:34:09.100
right? If it's the, if it's a family, we want the tribe. It's, if it's tribe, we might want the
00:34:13.720
church. If it's the church, we might want the state. And if it's the state, we might want something
00:34:18.380
above the state. Often this is why people are calling for international law and, you know, global
00:34:23.720
governance and, you know, these universal entities to step in and run our governments because they might
00:34:30.580
be abusive. In fact, the United States acts like, like one of these authorities, right? Oh, well, yeah,
00:34:36.960
I know your state is technically sovereign, but we don't like how you're treating your people. So we're
00:34:41.200
going to go bomb you, or we're going to get you, we're going to start a color revolution and replace
00:34:47.040
you. We're going to mess with your finances. We're going to sanction you. We're going to take all your
00:34:52.480
money in these international banks. We're going to act as this like wider authority that should be able
00:34:58.900
to capture everything and control it ultimately. And you as a leader, you shouldn't really have
00:35:04.800
authority. We see this all the time, right? And the reason for this is very simple. People don't
00:35:09.760
like to be ruled. They don't like to have authority over them. They don't like to submit
00:35:15.720
to authority. So they want to feel like there's always one more appeal. There's always one more
00:35:21.240
place they can go, right? And to be fair, appeal is a significant part of the American system.
00:35:26.480
But ultimately, you have to recognize that the buck stops somewhere. And when you get to the point
00:35:38.320
where it stops, someone will make that decision. Anyone who tells you it's a system, it's rule of
00:35:45.280
law. No, it's rule of a person. When it gets to the judge, the judge decides. When it gets to the
00:35:52.600
police officer, the police officer decides. When it gets to the president, the president decides.
00:35:56.500
When it gets to the king, the king decides. When it gets to, you know, the head virologist,
00:36:01.080
Anthony Fauci, Anthony Fauci decides. But someone always decides. This is the point of people like
00:36:08.920
Carl Schmitt or Joseph DeMaestro. Someone always decides. And systems are an obfuscation for human
00:36:16.860
power. So if someone has told you the constitution is the highest authority,
00:36:21.180
authority or, you know, the, you know, the, the system, the, the, the experts are the highest
00:36:26.200
authority. No, there's a human being, the human being with real flaws and real understandings and
00:36:33.560
real biases. And they will decide. Someone's going to decide. And the worst part about believing that
00:36:39.900
a system is in charge is then that the person who decides can be like, oh no, it's the system.
00:36:45.260
It's not me. It's because your neighbor voted for something. It's not my fault. An expert said I had
00:36:52.980
to do it. Oh, it's not, it's not me. It's, it's, it's your neighbor across the street. They're,
00:36:57.900
they're the one that supported the guy who's making this happen. There's no accountability.
00:37:01.820
There's still people making decisions, but they're not accountable because we've rejected the idea that
00:37:06.700
they have any authority, even though they obviously do. And this is where we can't really escape the need
00:37:12.380
for virtue. At the end of the day, a real society, a society that truly is interested
00:37:19.200
in liberty, that's truly interested in a real order, they're going to need virtuous people
00:37:28.880
at every step along this way. And again, this is what Alexis de Tocqueville recognized. This is what
00:37:35.540
all of these different philosophers recognize that the reason the United States worked is that very
00:37:40.440
virtuous people along every step were manning the heads of households, the heads of the church,
00:37:46.480
the head of the community organization, the fraternal organization, uh, the fire brigade that,
00:37:51.440
you know, and then the state itself, there is virtue at every step of the way. And because every man
00:37:57.220
understood virtue, they were able to remain sovereign in their domain. The virtuous father doesn't need
00:38:05.940
correction from the tribe and the virtuous tribal leader doesn't need correction from the church and
00:38:10.100
the virtuous church leader doesn't need correction from the state and the virtuous, uh, official at
00:38:15.000
the state, they have the final say, but they are acting for the good of the people. And you simply
00:38:22.060
cannot, you cannot avoid the fact that you must have virtue. It's inescapable. If you don't recognize
00:38:31.680
this, you don't get the problem. The problem is not the system. The problem is not that we have not
00:38:37.160
properly distributed government powers across number of branches, uh, that there's some flaw in,
00:38:44.540
I don't know, the commerce clause of the constitution that creates undue power for Congress. No, that's not
00:38:50.600
the issue. The issue is that the people weren't virtuous enough to stop Congress and the judiciary from
00:38:57.140
deciding what that clause meant. They didn't have the power to restrict the government through their
00:39:02.800
own will, through their own virtue. That's the problem. They were willing to give that power over.
00:39:10.860
And again, this is very scary because we think about places where like, okay, all the families and all
00:39:17.840
the governments and all these institutions in the South and the United States, they were fine with
00:39:22.040
segregation. So like, of course we have to go in and stop them at gunpoint. Well, okay. But none of
00:39:28.560
those things are sovereign anymore. You might disagree. You might say, oh, they were abusive.
00:39:33.820
They were abusing their power. They were unfair. Okay. But let's not pretend anything, but the state is
00:39:38.880
in charge at that point. Your federalism is gone. Your small government is gone. Your idea of checks and
00:39:44.720
balances, it's all gone because the state just tells people what to do at gunpoint. And what are you going to
00:39:50.120
do about it? Nothing. Right? Like that's it. Once you get to that point, once the state has that level
00:39:55.880
of power, then they make the decision. And maybe you agree with it. Like a lot of people did with
00:40:00.980
ending segregation, but make no mistake. You're saying the state has the final say in all systems,
00:40:07.440
in your business, in your church, in your social organizations, your personal business,
00:40:13.300
the government owns it all. The government has the authority to step in at any time. And once you've said
00:40:18.660
that, you've just ceded all more of the authority of the state. And remember, conservatives are on
00:40:22.660
board with a lot of this. They talk about small government, but ask them if they'd be okay with
00:40:28.580
the government stepping away and getting rid of something like the Civil Rights Act. All of a sudden
00:40:33.360
you get a whole lot of people. Oh no, we can't do that. We'll get Jim Crow back. Well, first, no,
00:40:39.700
we won't. Come on. Don't be ridiculous. Being racist is considered like the most evil thing you can do
00:40:43.960
in America. We're not going back to Jim Crow just because the government stops forcing people to
00:40:48.200
hire felons. But conservatives are still very, very scared of very simple things like scaling back
00:40:56.100
that kind of government interference. And the reason is simple. They have ceded all moral authority to
00:41:01.500
the government. And so any conservative who tells you, oh, well, I'm for small government, but I'm
00:41:06.340
keeping the Civil Rights Act. No, they're a liar. They're just a liar. Oh, I believe in liberty,
00:41:11.920
but we can't. No, no, you don't. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Because here's the truth.
00:41:18.620
If you want to keep government small, you have to put authority somewhere.
00:41:21.900
And that means that that authority might be abused by something that isn't the government.
00:41:25.600
And if you think the government is your only guarantor against these abuses, well, then you're
00:41:31.240
just a statist. You're just a big state guy. Like you're just a big government guy with extra steps
00:41:35.440
and you don't recognize it. You have to realize that if you're going to shrink the government,
00:41:41.120
if you're truly going to reduce the power of government, someone else has to rule. And if
00:41:45.260
someone else has to rule, they could abuse that power. They might make decisions that you don't
00:41:49.280
like and the government can't force them to change it. And that's how it actually has to work.
00:41:54.120
And if you don't understand this, if you don't allow for this, then you will inevitably get these
00:41:59.140
massive Leviathan states that we have. Now, a big part of this is, of course, also that our states
00:42:03.600
finally have the logistics to make this happen.
00:42:05.940
I wrote a whole book on this called The Total State, where once the government has built up
00:42:13.640
this technological ability to kind of managerialize everyone, squish them down, turn them into this
00:42:20.340
gray goo, apply these managerial different strategies to them because they have made them
00:42:27.220
all little automatons. If that's where you get to, the government can scale up almost infinitely,
00:42:32.120
but it does so by basically breaking down all these other spheres of influence.
00:42:36.540
The family no longer has authority because the state can do everything the family can do.
00:42:40.420
The tribe no longer has authority because the state can already do everything the tribe does.
00:42:45.300
The church no longer has authority because the state already does everything that the church does.
00:42:50.500
So the state does it all. It is the total state in every sense of the word.
00:42:55.220
And you have to get rid of that. You have to allow for that because power is no safer
00:43:01.500
inside the state. It's no more legitimate inside the state. Just because some of the badge walks in
00:43:07.800
and says, hey, stop doing that. It doesn't mean that they're going to use that ethically as the final
00:43:13.860
judge. But this is the problem. Again, conservatives, right-wingers, we look at power abuses by the
00:43:20.480
government in the UK right now, which are just insane and out of control, or even in America,
00:43:24.740
and we say, oh, we're against that. We're against, we're for small government. Are you really?
00:43:30.820
Would you really do what it takes to get rid of that authority and move it down other places?
00:43:37.540
Are you really willing to say, ultimately, the father is the head of the household and what he says
00:43:42.680
goes? The head of the tribe is the head and that's what goes. The head of the church is the head and
00:43:47.460
that's what goes. Are you really willing to say that? Are you willing? Are you willing to allow
00:43:53.120
decisions to be made at the fire brigade meeting and the fraternal order that aren't made at the
00:44:00.560
state level? Because if you're not willing to do that, then you're not conservative and you're not
00:44:06.060
for small government. You just want a different version of big government. And that's honestly what
00:44:12.100
most conservatives want. And that's what most libertarians actually end up creating.
00:44:17.060
Because the great thing about Bertrand de Juvenal is he's often called a libertarian. I have some
00:44:23.260
issues with that, but that's often the way that he is labeled. But he's creating this ordered liberty.
00:44:28.360
And by the way, this is why Hans Hermann Hoppe is the best libertarian, because he stole everything
00:44:32.560
from Bertrand de Juvenal. So if you enjoyed Democracy, the God that Failed, great. I enjoyed it too.
00:44:36.680
Great book. Now go read Bertrand de Juvenal because that's who he's ripping off. He's not just ripping
00:44:40.700
it off. I don't want to undersell Hoppe. He is adding important things, though I will say the
00:44:45.720
two thirds of his book where he's quoting Bertrand de Juvenal, I think is much better than the one
00:44:49.500
third of his book where he then tries to go off and create his own covenant communities. But even in
00:44:53.240
the libertarian paradigm, one of the points of Hoppe is that ultimately the community must be
00:44:58.700
willing to discriminate, right? It must be willing to discriminate. And that's why Hoppe is the most
00:45:05.800
based libertarian, because he recognizes that like, no, the community has the right to tell people
00:45:10.640
get out. You may remove them by force if necessary, right? This is the classic meme
00:45:17.260
with Hoppe. You have the right to select who's going to be there, because if you don't have that
00:45:21.960
right, you don't have sovereignty at all. And that means that ultimately you have to allow for the fact
00:45:27.440
that the community might expel people that you might have no problem with. But that's just how it
00:45:33.500
works. There's an authority, a sovereignty that exists in that scenario. And so if you're someone who's
00:45:38.960
talking about the dangers of big government, I want you to understand that, yes, I ultimately do
00:45:44.380
agree that a large government is a problem, but not in the way that you might be thinking. Because
00:45:49.200
I'm not saying get rid of this authority. I'm not saying that there should just not be authority.
00:45:53.800
No, authority will exist. It must exist. It must exist for order, and it must exist to keep larger
00:45:59.980
government under control. But the only way this happens is if we return authority to the places
00:46:06.080
where it belongs. We can't just be a libertarian who says, well, I want to be able to smoke my meat,
00:46:10.900
weed, and get gay married, and blah, blah, blah. No. No. Like, it doesn't mean that it's a free-for-all.
00:46:17.500
It's not libertine. It's ordered liberty. You have the liberty to pursue the good inside your
00:46:23.320
tradition and your religion as it is understood by your people. That is liberty. And it will be
00:46:30.000
governed by people inside your community who follow that tradition. And they will have legitimate
00:46:34.460
authority over you. Your father will have authority over you. Your tribal leader will have authority
00:46:38.720
over you. Your church leader will have authority over you. And then finally, if they must, the state
00:46:45.440
will be there. But if you don't have those intermediate institutions, you will never have small government.
00:46:50.260
And no conservative telling you about cutting a budget somewhere or eliminating government
00:46:54.960
programs. I'm in favor of all those things. But those are not the actual solution to the problem.
00:47:01.560
That's like treating an arm being blown off with a Band-Aid. Like, yes, I guess at some level,
00:47:09.580
at least you're stopping some bleeding. But you are not getting to the root problem here.
00:47:13.820
So yeah, cut USAID and get rid of these programs, the Department of Education, all that stuff.
00:47:19.460
I'm on board with all of it. But do not pretend this is the final answer to small government because
00:47:23.820
someone's going to rule. And if you ignore the fact that someone's going to rule, then the people
00:47:28.560
who do rule will do so without accountability. And that is how you definitely get big government.
00:47:35.600
All right, guys, I'm going to head over to the questions of the people here real quick. We've got a few.
00:47:39.900
Ram Zwingel says, someone is going to rule. So why shouldn't it be our guys? Let's have corruption
00:47:48.940
work for us for once. Well, again, I totally agree that we should have people who believe what we
00:47:55.260
believe, who have our traditions, have our faith, have our understanding of the good in charge. Now,
00:48:00.940
I wouldn't call this corruption. I would just say that it is okay to have a certain level of affinity
00:48:07.460
for people who share your beliefs, your tradition, your way of life. There's nothing wrong about that.
00:48:14.260
There's nothing immoral about that. People call this nepotism in a lot of instances, right? Oh,
00:48:19.120
he's hiring his son. He's hiring people from his community over the best candidate. Good.
00:48:23.680
Good. You should. You should do that. You should pass your things on to your children.
00:48:30.700
You should pass your traditions and your power and your abilities on to the people who are related
00:48:36.240
to you, who share your faith, who share your beliefs, who share your way of life, who you are bound
00:48:42.160
together by deep roots. You should prefer them. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, optimizing by
00:48:48.460
bringing in other people is a huge problem, and that's how you got to where you are.
00:48:53.680
So actually, yes, you should absolutely be doing it. Again, I wouldn't call that corruption. I would
00:48:56.620
just say that's just, you know, the way that every other society has existed throughout history.
00:49:04.540
Treadle says, uh, Stephen Wolf's observation in gynocracy ethics is not good and evil, but safe and
00:49:10.900
scary. Power is often scary, rarely safe. Clearly we must, uh, HR fight. Well, yeah, this is right. This is
00:49:17.380
kind of a classic male, female dynamic. Uh, Helen Andrews has just, uh, released kind of a piece and a
00:49:23.560
speech that have gone pretty viral on this issue, right? She talks about the difference between how
00:49:27.420
men and women perceive power. Men are more likely to embrace conflict and then bury it as where women
00:49:32.940
are more likely to try to avoid conflict, but never forgive it if it occurs. So a woman will, uh, just,
00:49:39.920
just kind of evolutionarily try to make sure she's constantly safe because having a child, having to
00:49:45.960
care for children is incredibly, uh, you know, vulnerable, uh, thing. And so she will try to
00:49:51.800
like be agreeable with as many people around her as possible. And if someone is disagreeable to her,
00:49:56.620
she automatically sees that as a threat because she's so vulnerable that any level of disagreement,
00:50:00.820
any disagreeableness could like blow back on her and put her in a terrible situation. By the way,
00:50:05.620
there are a lot of guys who'll be like, well, then that means, you know, no, that that's perfectly
00:50:09.600
reasonable. Like you need to value this aspect of, of being a woman, right? Like that doesn't mean you
00:50:15.800
want it to rule your society, but don't pretend that they didn't develop that proclivity for a
00:50:20.660
reason, right? This is a successful strategy for women across the board. That's why they do it.
00:50:27.720
Okay. So it's not, it's not that this is wrong at a certain scale. This is the right way for women
00:50:32.600
to behave at a certain scale. It's just that scale shouldn't be the power of the state, right? That that's
00:50:38.540
where the problem is. It's not that women have this instinct. It's that if that instinct is
00:50:42.300
misapplied at the wrong scale, then it creates a problem. Men are much more willing to wield power,
00:50:49.900
take these chances, right? Because that's what we're designed to do. The man is really honestly
00:50:54.720
supposed to be disposable. More men die than women. We know this. We know this because they tend to be
00:51:00.740
bigger and stronger. That's going to shorten your life. They're more likely to engage in acts that are
00:51:06.280
risky, like physical combat or labor that is more intensive. You don't hear a lot of women saying,
00:51:11.080
Hey, I really wish that I could get involved in those jobs where you're more likely to get
00:51:15.360
electrocuted or fall off ladder, that kind of stuff, right? Like it's, it's just not a thing.
00:51:19.820
Now the upside is that means that like when big dangerous or big powerful things get done,
00:51:26.180
it's usually met because men are more willing to take those risks and put themselves in those
00:51:31.320
positions. But it also means that when like the worst things in the world are done,
00:51:35.580
it's also because men kind of did them, right? Like greatness can be both uplifting and terrible,
00:51:40.420
but it tends to be masculine in the sense, again, not every time there are of course,
00:51:45.020
women who are called very capable of greatness. And there are men who will live their entire lives
00:51:50.000
trying to be as safe as possible, right? Like these are not hard and fast individuals, very quite,
00:51:56.260
quite widely, but as an observable trend, that's true. And so when we do have this search for power
00:52:02.640
that is more feminine, then yes, you will get the more feminine social expressions. Again, not because
00:52:07.800
women are evil or anything, but because that's just a natural manifestation of who they are playing
00:52:12.840
itself out. And that can be very valuable in settings like family or community, but it can be a
00:52:19.000
real hindrance when you're looking at a nation where you must wield decisive power, when you must often
00:52:24.840
kill or punish people. You must do radical things that, that are, that are very aggressive and very
00:52:31.120
transgressive and will create a lot of hate for you. A lot of blowback. That, that is something that
00:52:36.160
a lot of women do not like and cannot handle very well. Some women can, there are women out there
00:52:40.900
going to do it, but that is just an observable reality. So when you have women in charge in those
00:52:45.040
ways, you will see less of that behavior, which ultimately for something at the scale of state power
00:52:49.840
can be quite the issue. All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up. Looks like that's
00:52:56.040
all of our questions for today. I want to say thank you to everybody for stopping by and watching. If
00:53:00.860
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