Stefan Molyneux
  • 11 months ago
Come and see the Freedomain classic which had millions upon millions of views before I was de-platformed.

For many, The Story of Your Enslavement was their first introduction to Freedomain. Here it is again, with enhanced audio and video!

We can only be kept in the cages we do not see. A brief history of human enslavement - up to and including your own. From Freedomain.com, the largest and most popular philosophy conversation in the world.

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Transcript
00:00 This is the story of your enslavement.
00:05 How it came to be, and how you can finally be free.
00:13 Like all animals, human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them.
00:20 At first we mostly hunted and fished and ate off the land, but then something magical and
00:26 terrible happened to our minds.
00:30 We became, alone among the animals, afraid of death and of future loss.
00:40 And this was the start of a great tragedy and an even greater possibility.
00:48 You see, when we become afraid of death, of injury and imprisonment, we become controllable.
00:55 And so valuable, in a way that no other resource could ever be.
01:03 The greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources or tools
01:09 or animals or land, but other human beings.
01:17 You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment.
01:23 But you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, with torture or imprisonment in
01:30 the future, because animals have very little sense of tomorrow.
01:38 You cannot threaten a cow with torture or a sheep with death.
01:43 You cannot swing a sword at a tree and scream at it to produce more fruit, or hold a burning
01:48 torch to a field and demand more wheat.
01:53 You cannot get more eggs by threatening a hen, but you can get a man to give you his
02:00 eggs by threatening him.
02:05 This human farming has been the most profitable and destructive occupation throughout history,
02:14 and it is now reaching its destructive climax.
02:20 Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is.
02:26 A series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.
02:36 Some people get confused, because governments provide health care and water and education
02:40 and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work.
02:47 Nothing could be further from the reality.
02:53 Farmers provide health care and irrigation and training to their livestock.
03:02 Some people get confused, because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine that our
03:06 governments protect our freedoms.
03:11 But farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields, and will allow
03:17 certain animals larger stalls or fields, if it means they will produce more meat and milk.
03:26 In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms, not because he
03:33 cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits.
03:39 Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?
03:46 There have been four major phases of human farming.
03:52 The first phase in ancient Egypt was direct and brutal human compulsion.
03:58 Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind remained beyond
04:03 the reach of the whip and the brand and the shackles.
04:08 Slaves remained woefully underproductive and required enormous resources to control.
04:16 The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom,
04:22 ingenuity, and creativity, which raised their productivity.
04:28 This increased the wealth of Rome, and thus the tax income of the Roman government, and
04:33 with this addition of wealth, Rome became an empire, destroying the economic freedoms
04:38 that fed its power and collapsed.
04:44 I'm sure that this does not seem entirely unfamiliar.
04:51 After the collapse of Rome, the feudal model introduced the concept of livestock ownership
04:55 and taxation.
04:58 Instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land that they could retain as long
05:03 as they paid off the local warlords.
05:06 This model eventually broke down due to the continual subdivision of productive land and
05:11 was destroyed during the enclosure movement when land was consolidated and hundreds of
05:16 thousands of peasants were kicked off their ancestral lands because new farming techniques
05:22 made larger farms more productive with fewer people.
05:28 The increased productivity of the later Middle Ages created the excess food required for
05:33 the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise to the modern democratic model
05:39 of human ownership.
05:43 As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, a huge stock of cheap human capital became
05:49 available to the rising industrialists, and the ruling class of human farmers quickly
05:54 realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock choose their own occupations.
06:04 Under the democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the mafia model.
06:10 The mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month
06:15 to steal from the business owners.
06:22 You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity and thus the
06:29 taxes you can pay to your masters.
06:33 Value this time in your life, kids, because this is the time in your life when you still
06:36 have your choices.
06:37 And it goes by so fast.
06:38 When you're a teenager, you think you can do anything, and you do.
06:41 Your 20s are a blur.
06:42 30s, you raise your family, you make a little money, and you think to yourself, "What happened
06:46 to my 20s?"
06:47 40s, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin.
06:50 The music starts to get too loud.
06:51 One of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.
06:53 50s, you have a minor surgery.
06:54 You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery.
06:56 60s, you'll have a major surgery.
06:58 The music is still loud, but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway.
07:01 70s, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale.
07:03 You start eating dinner at two o'clock in the afternoon.
07:05 You have lunch around 10, breakfast the night before.
07:07 You spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt
07:10 and muttering, "How come the kids don't call?
07:11 How come the kids don't call?"
07:12 In the 80s, you'll have a major stroke.
07:14 You end up battling with some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand, but who you call
07:17 mama.
07:18 Any questions?
07:19 Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners.
07:27 The great challenge of the democratic model is that increases in wealth and freedom threaten
07:32 the farmers.
07:35 The ruling classes initially profit from a relatively free market in capital and labor,
07:39 but as their livestock become more used to their freedoms and growing wealth, they begin
07:45 to question why they need rulers at all.
07:49 Ah well, nobody ever said that human farming was easy.
07:58 Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes is a three-phase
08:03 process.
08:05 The first is to indoctrinate the young through government "education."
08:12 As the wealth of democratic countries grew, government schools were universally inflicted
08:17 in order to control the thoughts and souls of the livestock.
08:24 The second phase is to turn citizens against each other through the creation of dependent
08:29 livestock.
08:33 It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force, and where it can be
08:37 achieved, it remains cripplingly underproductive, as can be seen in North Korea.
08:43 Human beings do not breed well or produce efficiently in direct captivity.
08:50 Ah, but if human beings believe that they are free, then they will produce much more
08:56 for their farmers.
08:58 The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on
09:02 the payroll of the farmer.
09:06 Those cows that become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack any other cows
09:11 who point out the violence, hypocrisy, and immorality of human ownership.
09:23 Officers positioned Grant face first on the floor with one officer near his head, a second
09:28 near his back, and a third officer standing nearby.
09:31 There appeared to be a brief struggle, then a two-year veteran Bard officer stands, draws
09:38 his weapon, and fires.
09:46 Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom.
09:52 If you can get the cows to attack each other whenever anybody brings up the reality of
09:57 their situation, then you don't have to spend nearly as much controlling them directly.
10:04 Those cows who become dependent upon the stolen largesse of the farmer will violently oppose
10:09 any questioning of the virtue of human ownership, and the intellectual and artistic classes,
10:14 always and forever dependent upon the farmers, will say to anyone who demands freedom from
10:19 ownership, "You will harm your fellow cows."
10:26 The livestock are thus kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness
10:33 of a violent system to those who demand real freedom.
10:41 The third phase is to invent continual external threats so that the frightened livestock cling
10:45 to the protection of the farmers.
10:52 This system of human farming is now nearing its end.
10:58 The terrible tragedies of modern western economic systems has occurred not in spite of, but
11:05 because of, past economic freedoms.
11:10 The massive increases in western wealth throughout the 19th century resulted from economic freedoms,
11:16 and it was this very increase in wealth that fed the size and power of the state.
11:23 Whenever the livestock become exponentially more productive, you get a corresponding increase
11:27 in the number of farmers and their dependents.
11:31 The growth of the state is always proportional to the preceding economic freedoms.
11:38 Economic freedoms create wealth, and the wealth attracts more thieves and political parasites,
11:43 whose greed then destroys the economic freedoms.
11:49 In other words, freedom metastasizes the cancer of the state.
11:57 The government that starts off the smallest will always end up the largest.
12:05 This is why there can be no viable and sustainable alternative to a truly free and peaceful society.
12:13 A society without political rulers, without human ownership, without the violence of taxation
12:19 and statism.
12:25 To be truly free is both very easy and very hard.
12:32 We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is so painful to see it directly.
12:42 We dance around the endless violence of our dying system because we fear the attacks of
12:48 our fellow livestock.
12:52 But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see.
13:01 Wake up.
13:04 To see the farm is to leave it.
13:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]