Tomasz Kaye: Voluntaryist and Creator of George Ought to Help [Mirror]

If we approve of state programs that redistribute wealth, we must also approve of threats of violence made against peaceful individuals, because this is how the funds are collected. On the other hand, most of us feel uncomfortable about threatening peaceful people when we imagine having to make the threats ourselves.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Peaceful Anarchism on the Voluntary Virtues Network every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. You could also find me on TheConsciousResistance.com and TheSeedsOfLiberty.com. So today we have Tomas Que coming in from the Netherlands. He is the mastermind behind the Bit Butter YouTube channel—an awesome, excellent animated anarcho-capitalist YouTube channel. Oh yeah, just his background: he is a volunteerist, anarcho-capitalist, and a father of a one-and-a-half-year-old. His website is JorgeOughtToHelp.com and he's also got a Facebook page, Jorge Orta Help. You can donate to him through Patreon and Bitcoin, so we'll include those links—all those links—in the description.

So Tomas, thank you for coming on the show.

You're very welcome.

Hello! Yes, I've heard about you, and I've been meaning to reach out to you for a while now. You've had your YouTube channel for a few years, right?

Yeah, it's really ancient now. I'm just going to stroke the other day by how old it is, but still, there is a lot of good stuff to impart, you know? A lot of great information, and you know, with animation that just draws a whole new crowd. Because you know, it's one thing when you watch, like, a talk at the Mises Institute if somebody, you know, Tom Woods or Stephan Kinsella or somebody like that, and they're just saying a speech, and that's one way to learn, right? But that reaches, I think, a certain point of population that are more intellectual, right? But some people are more visual, right? And so, you know, videos like yours, which incorporate these concepts into animation, really reach them, and that's great, you know? It's just spreading the message that much farther. So, I'm very thankful for that.

So before we get into those videos, can you go into a little bit of your history on how you became a volunteerist or an anarcho-capitalist? You know, what got you down this path?

Sure, so I was definitely—I have this ancient YouTube channel, and so I was making a mean atheist, and I was making—but when I set up my YouTube channel, that was primarily what I was talking about. I was making videos relating to theology, and at a certain point, one of my subscribers suggested that I look at this one video, and that was from the user—I forgot what his username was then, since then I believe he went by Fringe Elements. He had a video—in any case, called—I don't know if it was called this, anyway, the central idea was the state is a death threat, and it talked about the essence of at least the state’s legislature and its fundamental connection to what ultimately is death threats, you know? These laws work because everyone knows on some level that if you resist enough—like if you don’t comply, then the state will see you dead before leaving you alone.

So that was—that made a big impression on me. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, and so after watching that video, I was very curious to learn more about it. Most of my research happened through the Mises.org website. That was really an exciting few months for me, especially when I was first getting into that stuff. And at the same time, I was noticing that the way these ideas were communicated—also that one video that I watched was very unaccommodating. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but you know what I mean, it was not at all seductive in a certain sense with a girl—it wasn’t gentle; it didn’t accommodate it—it didn’t make much accommodation for people who may not be used to hearing these ideas, but who would nevertheless be open-minded enough to consider them.

So I thought that I could do a better job than most of what was out there of putting a similar argument, which—and I think the argument in Jorge Ought To Help is closely related to the one I saw in that video. And so that’s what I started. I started to put that together in the evenings, learning After Effects during the process, and posted that. And so since then, my focus changed from atheism to volunteerism and everything connected to it.

Any books or podcasts that specifically influenced you?

Yeah, so books that were a big deal to me were The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, which is now available—at least one of the previous editions is now available for free as a PDF, which is fantastic. What else? There were so many! I think more recently, Michael Huemer’s book The Problem of Political Authority—I think that one’s right now; that’s the one I recommend to people who I think have enough patience to actually read a book about it and who want to know more. I think that right now, that’s kind of, in my mind, that does the job that Machinery of Freedom does, but a little bit better or a little bit more thoroughly.

So it’s a shame that book is so expensive relatively, but yeah, that was really an important one.

Yeah, for me, my transformation was catalyzed by The Creature from Jekyll Island, and then also Murray Rothbard, you know, a few of the stuff online from Mises.org, also The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar, I think, and Anatomy of the State, and What Does Government Done to Our Money—those kinds of things. Mmm yeah, really, really powerful short books, but very powerful. And it’s just amazing when you read something that—it’s like you said, you know, it’s like the state surrounds us, right? You know, laws and taxes and regulations, and it also surrounds us, right? But we don’t necessarily—it's like, I guess it’s like, you know, it’s like you're living in a fenced-in area, but you never actually look up close at the fence, and you don’t look at the barbed wires; you don’t look at the electricity that’s running through it; you’re just living there, right? You feel confined, right? Until somebody says, you know what? Those things are electrified, and that’s sharp, and if you try to escape, someone’s gonna shoot you. You’re like, wait, what?

And everyone actually—and everyone kind of knows that; like, they have all the information they need to see that that’s true. It’s not like—you don’t have to test it. Mhm, like if you just seriously think it through, then you see that it’s true; they won’t leave you alone. It wouldn’t—I mean, the system wouldn’t work if they did.

Yeah, yeah, it’s really powerful stuff, I think.

So the way—who said it? But a powerful quote that stayed with me is there are people who just want to be left alone and people who won’t leave you alone, because the people who are attracted to political power are usually not the type of people that are like creative and ingenious and imaginative, right? Entrepreneurs—they’re the people that want to add value to society and create jobs and just improve the standard of living, right? Create wealth. Those people don’t want to control other people; they don’t want to control their neighbor or their town or the state, you know?

Mhm, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, I guess it’s kind of—and once you’ve kind of been introduced to these ideas, then it’s like so much of the opposition to them, like discursively, is really weak. I think that by this certain—I think if you were statist, if you believe in the necessity or the, you know, the good, essential goodness of the state, then I think at least you have to—in order to argue for that convincingly—you at least have to acknowledge that the state does maintain threats of violence against peaceful people. I think you can’t—if you’re not willing to bite that bullet, then you, you know, you don’t have a leg to stand on, I think. And there are very few people willing to admit that. I think that’s really interesting.

Yeah, I think interestingly enough, I see some of the Americus and like denialists also that say that, you know, you say you anarchists don’t think the social contract is binding, right? Because you didn’t say, well, I didn’t sign the non-aggression principle; so why do I have to follow—it’s violence; that’s violence too! Like, what? We hold on—it's a weird way to look at it, you know? It's like I should be able to kill somebody without repercussions.

I guess—in a way, if someone wants to say that, you know, it’s fair enough, and the conversation’s over. I guess I can—for me, it’s like, it’s all to do with—it’s to persuade a person of the validity of these ideas means appealing to their foundational moral beliefs to begin with. Like, you know, if you really think this and this and this is wrong, then you should also think this is wrong. This is—you know, this is just an example of this stuff.

If a person doesn’t believe there’s anything—if they don’t have this kind of visceral disgust at the idea of violence against someone who’s not aggressing against you—like if that’s no problem for them, then this is just a person who—it's not a person who you’re gonna discuss this with anyway. So it’s like, okay, we’re just gonna ostracize you and try to defend ourselves against you. You’re a good candidate for a padded room, right? With a straitjacket.

Alright, yeah, it’s like—yeah, it’s an interesting idea that, you know, a person who doesn’t share your like—that’s this like insufficient overlapping in your foundational moral beliefs—and they somehow want you to want to persuade them about something. And I think it’s—you know, I don’t think dialogue is always necessary or possible, actually. It’s possible that people are so different in what they believe is okay that, you know, the whole process of reasoning is not going to go anywhere, but I think those people are quite rare. I think actual, like real sociopaths or, you know, people who really have no—who don’t intuitively feel that, you know, violence against people is—I think those people are quite rare, fortunately.

Yeah, fortunately, exactly. And the problem is that, you know, the contradiction is that, you know, when people say, well, it’s because people can be evil and can be, you know, thieving and can be dishonest, that’s why we need government. Like, wait a minute. But where do you think the criminals are gonna go who want to control other people? I mean, you seriously think they’re not gonna want to go into an institution that concentrates that evil even more? Like, right, right?

And also, you know, because thieving is bad, you want to create an institution that operates off theft, essentially, you know? That’s also kind of a weird idea.

Yeah, this is really kind of preaching to the choir now. Right, I’m curious also as to, like, when you talk to people, like how do you introduce this stuff? How do you start? How do you get people to start thinking about it, like when you’re, you know, in your everyday life?

They ask me what I do, and I say I make anti-political propaganda videos.

That sounds interesting!

Yeah, you can then—I say you can Google Jorge Ought to Help, and that’s what I—I’m not—I guess I’m not an evangelist in, you know, like I’m not like, you know, the government is, you know, screwing you over. I don’t because I don’t think it works. You know that guy in the subway shouting at the people passing? You know that guy? I’m not cut out for it, I think. You need a special glint in your eyes to be able to pull that off.

Exactly, yeah, yeah. I’m very soft-spoken.

So, yeah, having made that video and having it be, you know, and having the follow-up to that become like a big part of my life now, that kind of has enabled me to introduce this stuff where I otherwise wouldn’t have felt appropriate because it is what I do now. So it’s kind of like I can legitimately say that, and then people will say, well, I’ll check it out. And sometimes they do.

Yeah, I’m really glad I found it. So can you explain—I think you made three different videos, right? So Jorge Ought to Help, and then You Can Always Leave. I think—is it called, yeah, this third—there’s three in that kind of world or in that series. There’s Jorge Ought to Help, there’s They Exploiter, which is about the minimum wage, and as you can always leave, which is really a sequel to Jorge Ought to Help.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So can you go into them and what they’re about? Because I think.

Yeah, so Jorge Ought to Help is an examination of the idea of the welfare state and how that operates on a fundamental level, and it invites the viewer to examine whether that fits—whether it occurs with their intuitions about the legitimacy of threats of violence. So, of course, you know, the welfare state operates through taxation. Taxation is collected through—you know, it’s possible to collect taxation because it’s kind of undergirded by these threats of violence, which people know on some level. They can’t just choose—they can opt not to pay.

So it kind of steps through a bunch of scenarios. The first one is you’re—the viewer is asked to consider whether they would be comfortable-kind of issuing a threat against a friend of theirs, like a direct interpersonal threat, like, you know, there’s this—this is good cause that appears; you feel strongly that this good cause should be supported; your friend doesn’t want to support it; they don’t give reasons. Would it be okay to threaten, you know, to beat them up if they—you know, to try and get them to donate? And of course, I hope that most people would kind of recoil at that suggestion and if, you know, of course that’s not okay.

And then the scenario is modified so it becomes more and more like the situation under representative democracy. Well, you know, you have a group of voters who are deciding, you know, a course of action to take, but the threats are still there; they’re just institutionalized.

So yeah, you have these two extremes, and you know, you have a couple of stages in between, which is kind of the situation morphs towards resembling the final one a little bit more, and the question I asked to people who post critical comments mostly is in which of those situations does it become okay to threaten violence against your friend? You know, at what point does the things—does it—is there, like, what point is there ethically relevant difference that happens? And so far I haven’t received any kind of adequate answer to that. So that’s—what that’s done videos about—that’s how I think it works at least.

And after that, I made—before you go into the next one, I just want to comment something that came to mind is when George refused to help, right?

Yeah, yeah, okay, so George when George refuses to help, what came to mind is like, you know, a voluntary society, right? Over voluntarism, the freedom is also—well, freedom also encompasses the freedom to be racist, bigoted, sexist, discriminatory, basically, right? So George might not have wanted to help the guy who needs help for any reason, you know, because he’s a guy or because he’s gay or because he’s black or he’s Mexican, right? So it could be for any reason; and that’s, I think, that’s another thing that really gets under people’s skin when we say that. People really don’t like that.

Yeah, yeah, when you say that what is wrong with the racist? You know, as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody, of course, right? It’s just a belief, right? I mean, maybe a very damaging belief to him in his society, in his peers, but again, it’s just a belief, and he’s not hurting anybody with that belief.

Yeah, I’ve on the sub—I mean, racism is a big thing and a touchy thing, of course, but I think it’s like—it’s really badly used term, like it’s really—most of the time, it’s really not clear to me exactly what people mean when they use the term, yeah? Races exist in the sense that you can identify these categories, and you can make predictions about those groups that hold true; like they differ in certain ways, so you could—it’s reasonable; you can create a hypothetical situation in which the rational thing to do would be to discriminate on the basis of race.

Like, say, you say, you know, you’re in such-and-such a situation; you’re evaluating this person, but you only know their race—like there’s nothing else you know about them—you know, do you choose this guy or all that one to do this particular thing? And yeah, then it makes sense to discriminate according to race. And if that’s so, you know, maybe that—maybe that’s racist, and if it is, then at least in hypothetical situations, we should be racists. So it’s like—and of course the word racist is used; it means a really damning term, so it’s—it kind of—it doesn’t—there’s a mismatch there, I think.

Yeah, I think we need to—we have been using that term using the statist. We need to think more carefully about what that word means.

Yeah, and the other thing is, is like I have a book by Walter Block—I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on discrimination. And he’s—I’ve seen him speak a lot about it, and basically, you know, we discriminate every day, all the time, right? It is impossible not to discriminate. When you make a choice for something, you’re excluding other choices; you are discriminating, right? I saw a little speech by Walter Williams when he was asked about this, about racism and discrimination, and he’s basically said I discriminated when I married my wife. I preferred her over other women, right? I was discriminating, and even now that we’re married, I’m still discriminating her. And my wife is happy that I’m discriminating her, of course.

Of course! Like you have this very peculiar situation where we’re like, you know, shopkeepers are legally barred from—they’re not permitted to turn people away; you know, who mentioned a particular demographic that they, for whatever reason, good or bad, don’t like—they’re not permitted to do that. And at the same time, people are permitted—I mean, no one thinks twice about it; people discriminate according to race in their interpersonal and romantic relations all the time, and this is—this is perfectly okay, we think. And I see no non-justification for a difference in attitudes toward those two situations. Like in the one situation, you have, you know, like a medium of exchange passing hands, but what’s, you know, ethically magical about that?? How does—you know, why would that make a difference?

You know, and you could argue that, for instance, like, let’s say someone was very lonely and they, you know, they maybe they never had a romantic or sexual partner, and they approach you and they, you know, they’re trying to, you know, seduce you, I’d say. And you turn them down because you’re just not into whatever group they happen to, you know, fit into. There’s a case, you know, maybe that turning them down is more damaging to them than them being turned away from baking cakes, for instance. And yet, you know, there’s this weird double standard. I don’t understand it. I don’t see any justification for it.

Yeah, because if you’re obligated to do something because you think someone else might, you know, do something horrible to themselves because you turned them down, then again, you don’t own yourself; you don’t own your actions, right? They have a higher claim to your actions, right? So to me, that violates, you know, self-ownership. And, you’re right, like if the individual can discriminate with all these things, and you know, the dating world and in every single interaction you make, why is that different with the business, right? You know, an individual can discriminate, so too can the business; you’re discriminating because it’s all it’s just about individuals, right? Individuals acting in a different—in a certain way, right?

Yeah, and with—and, like, with the individual romantic sphere, at least I think there’s this—in general, people are okay with the idea that people can make mistakes and that people can make bad decisions, you know? They should be allowed to do that, but that tolerance is not extended to the—to the situations that involve pieces of paper changing hands. Alright? You know, this is really…really odd.

Yeah, yeah, so, okay, can you go on with it—that was—was it You Can Always Leave?

Sure, would you—your free to leave? I figured that—so the second one was Ethically Exploiter.

Unless this logic—that one’s about the minimum wage. And, yeah, so that illustrates what the minimum wage actually does to the most vulnerable members of the workforce, which I think still not enough people understand. And I think that some of these things are quite counter-intuitive, and I think, you know, in a way, it’s kind of low-hanging fruits; it’s a very easy idea to understand, I think, once it’s being presented to you.

And I think it’s really important that the people don’t stop with their emotional response to a particular policy, you know—fair wage for everyone—and there—go a little bit further and understand what the actual consequences of that are likely to be. So that’s a video that potentially appealing to our—at least compatible with the Mises set of ideas.

And then the last—I can go a little bit on that one. So the minimum wage is, again, another highly emotionally charged topic, right, for a lot of people, especially anything on the left-right socialist type people who, you know, want—they call it a living wage, right? What exactly is a living wage? And you know, you’re taking into account inflation, the Federal Reserve currency creation; you know, it’s like—and then it’s just funny how people think that, you know, you pass a law and you force businesses to pay a certain weight, and you know, a certain amount—what could go wrong? That that violates, you know—that kind of magic—that violates the laws of economics. Can suddenly, you know, vanish and everything will be well? You won’t be richer because some old guy nobody ever met passed, you know, wrote on a piece of paper.

And then, you know, yeah, I think it really says a couple of things about—about a kind of mindset that’s really prevalent, and it’s like, on the one hand, that the state does have these powers which it doesn’t. You know, I mean, all it has is a lot of power, and it has power to use violence, but the idea that it can overturn economic law, of course, and the other thing is, like, people view the economy as a static system. So you know, it’s just like it—it’s there on, like, a—you know, in your spreadsheet or, you know, you can change this bit. It’s just this bit that’s wrong, so you change that, and you know everything is okay then. And of course, it’s nothing like that, and everything responds to everything else in some way or another.

I guess—I guess you just made me think of something. When you said that, maybe some people view the economy as a program, and, you know, the government is the programmer.

Yeah. And there are certain bugs that happen, and they have to come in, and they have to fix the bugs.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, and it’s like, yeah, but it’s when you—it’s—you know, once you’ve seen the mistake in that thinking, it’s difficult for me to—then put myself in the shoes of people who haven’t seen it, I guess. Like, of course, the employer is gonna think twice about how you can arrange his business, like where—where can he save costs? Who’s now costing more than they’re bringing in, right?

Right.

And not only that, but all the different factors of competition. Like, you know, you have workers competing with each other, and then you have the employers competing with each other, and the relationship between the employer and the employee. And then, you know, now—not only the employer is competing with each other in the same field, and then maybe they’re competing with other fields that are unrelated, where people could be spending their money, but they’re not because they’re buying from him.

Right, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly, and that was—if you Google the indispensable janitor fallacy, a guy called John Colt has addressed one of the common complaints made about the Ethically Exploiter video. And I hope I can summarize it correctly. So, the idea is that a lot of people said in the comments is, well, it’s like—so in the story, there’s this Edgar, who is this kind of evil capitalist stereotype who has a factory. Simon is a worker who’s sweeping the floor. And so, when a minimum wage is introduced, you know, Simon’s estimated marginal revenue product is lower than the wage he would legally be required to be paid. So Edgar Simon—and the objection a lot of people made was you can’t run a factory without someone cleaning it. You know, it’s like, you know, you—the janitor is indispensable; you know, you can’t—you know, the rubbish would heap up. You would have just—you know, I don’t know exactly what they imagined, but you know, things would go to hell without someone sweeping the floor.

And I think what it misses out is that, again, it’s like this example of aesthetic systems thinking. Like people imagine that Edgar has this structure of production, and all he can do is knock out Simon. You know, that’s his option; like he can have Simon, or he can knock him out; he can get rid of him. And the rest of it is gonna fix, and of course that’s not the way it works. Edgar is a kind of, you know, he’s a reasoning human with, like, all the options available to him as Simon resources allows for. And he could do one of any number of things; he could rearrange his structure of production; he could mechanize more, all the way to he could choose to close down all operations and live off whatever he’s managed to earn.

So people are kind of stuck in this idea that, you know, he has a factory; how’s the factory gonna run, you know, under this very particular set of assumptions?

That’s—that’s kind of interesting. Yeah, they just take something like a specific—I guess there’s a cherry-picking; you just take a specific detail and then just delete it, and then like, well, and I wouldn’t wear a good collapse, like you said. Like in a program, the difference is that the different bits in a program are not reasoning and don’t have critical analysis capabilities, you know, don’t have logic, or as people in the economy are thinking individuals. Humans are making their own choices constantly, alright? Billions of choices made every day, which is, which is again another reason why it is impossible for any leader or president or prime minister or anybody who tries to direct, you know, these billions of interactions—anything he does will cause damaged ripple down repercussions.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. And I think people are people—they don’t like the messiness of decentralization. Like they—I think that—because they’re like—in decentralized systems, are not—sure if I’m using that word completely correctly—in systems where there is all this highly local implicit knowledge that people are relying on all the time, mistakes are being made all the time all across the economy. And I think that idea, people don’t like that idea, I believe. And so it’s kind of—there’s something seductive about the idea of central planners who can, you know, just get it right for everyone—just—and avoid all those— all those messy mistakes. And I think people don’t yet appreciate in general how important those mistakes are. Like that’s part of it—that’s a crucial part of the process, and they need to be happening all over the economy all the time.

Yeah, statism is, like, who said it? It’s like it keeps the people in a perpetual state of infancy where they don’t—they don’t look to solve their own problems, but rather they look to their rulers to solve it for them, right?

They, they, yeah.

And also another way—I’m just thinking about it, perhaps it’s like—it’s like the human body, and in the mistakes that you said, it’s like in the human body how many times do cells, you know, mutate and maybe form spontaneous cancers, but you never see them because they automatically are destroyed, resorbed, and disposed of by your immune system.

And eventually those kinds of things make you stronger, right?

Absolutely. I think it’s really—maybe it’s overlooked that there’s like there’s an aspect of appreciating markets which is aesthetic. Like you have to—you’re gonna have to have a taste for the way that works. It has to kind of appeal to you.

Yeah, I think on the level of aesthetics, I think maybe that’s not talked about enough. Like I like it that there are all these mistakes being made everywhere, that there’s a lot of redundancy and that the result is, if it’s left to itself, very robust, and that you don’t have these catastrophic failures that sweep through the whole thing, I believe.

Yeah, yeah, I just—to just pick up on one thing you said, I found myself being more careful about using the word infantilize because I don’t think—I’ve since having it—since having a kid, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that kids do look for—the look to their parents to do everything for them, depending on how you—depending on how you parent, I guess.

Okay, or at least that’s what I would hope.

Yeah, yeah. I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old, so I, you know, I really try to treat them as equals, right? Don’t— the whole idea about peaceful parenting and about, you know, raising your kid and respecting them as a person, as an individual, right? That they have their own right to their own body, self-ownership—all the rights that you have. And so therefore that would, you know, preclude things like corporal punishment and spanking and even public schooling and you know, so many things that you would—that you—they either, you know, most parents don’t think twice about asking consent for circumcision, and they just do because most of the time because everybody else does it, right? It’s in the appeal to popularity, or it’s been done, you know, for so many years, so why would I not do it, right?

So, yeah, yeah, good point. Oh, one other thing I thought was, it is—I think it’s an interesting tangent—so you talked about the analogy with a program, and I like the economy versus a computer program, something like that. I think there are a very limited number of video games that do a decent job of making the case for freedom or decentralization. And I think that has something to do with the way that—you know, that kind of model—if you have a lot of SimCity-ish things where you’re—the controller, you’re arranging these things, and that’s, you know—that’s what makes it interesting to join in with that process. Like you have that power—SimCity isn’t interesting if everyone just does their thing without needing you, and everything works fine, and even it works better than if you do get involved.

And I guess the—I guess the most interesting ones are the video games that, like the massively multiplayer ones, where you’re kind of essentially—they outsource their interestingness to actual humans, who are making genuine decisions with very local knowledge, intrinsic knowledge for the kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s been something I’ve been thinking about lately, and I’m involved in making a video game, and so it’s kind of in the back of my mind how—and if even video games could be a medium that can be used. So we’re kind of—it’s propaganda, essentially, and I don’t think propaganda is too bad; I’m quite comfortable using it.

Yeah, I was actually wondering when you said, you described your work as anti-political propaganda. Well, why do you choose to use the word propaganda? Because that does have a negative connotation.

Yeah, I guess there’s a number of levels to it. On the one hand, it’s kind of—I suppose it’s kind of sensational, like people are used to that connotation, I suppose. People are not used to people, you know, saying that’s what I do. That’s just what I do. On the other hand, my propaganda means media designed to influence opinion, which is unquestionably what I’m doing. It’s— it’s kind of—condensate like the negative conversation it has, it kind of adds to that, you know, through deception or through dishonesty.

And of course, I don’t think that’s what I’m doing, but the core of what propaganda is, I believe that’s definitely what I’m doing. And it is a separate form of expression, like it’s—this—it’s distinct from other stuff that’s out there, I think. So it’s important to acknowledge that that’s the category it belongs to.

Yeah, it’s really the first time I heard of somebody—I mean especially a non-capitalist, refer to their own work as propaganda. I will reconsider the definition of that word now. You’ve influenced me.

So, yeah. And what about the last video in your series that you’ve done so far?

Yeah, so the last in a series is You Can Always Leave, and it’s the longest of the three, and it’s like the script of that video is based, often kind of taken like verbatim from comments that were made in response to Jorge Ought to Help. So the form of You Can Always Leave is two characters; you can imagine like perhaps a statist and then a voluntarist, and they’re having a discussion about Jorge Ought to Help. So they’re kind of—they’re watching it on a TV screen, and they have a conversation about it afterward. And that kind of that conversation is also illustrated with—you know, kind of sequences of the— kind of visualized the hypothetical situations they’re considering.

So, like the skeleton character, the one that I did the voice for, is the statist. I thought that was appropriate that I should—I was a big thing in my mind was that I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to strawman what the critics of the video had been saying. And I thought—I came across that expression recently, an Iron Man—once it’s Iron Man, their criticism, so I wanted to make them as—you know, modify them to make them as strong as possible in my mind, at least. So I kind of took out all the name-calling and all the invective, and I like I took what I thought were the best bits, and I had the skeleton character make those objections in a very civil, reasonable way, I thought.

And then the lion character or the yellow character responds to those in a way, I think—well, in a way that I might if I was kind of, especially, you know, on it and I could get the words out in the right order. So, yeah, so it’s—I believe it kind of addresses the most commonly made and the most weighty criticisms. And they kind of fall into two groups, those criticisms. Like the first ones are essentially saying Jorge Ought to Help is misleading because the state doesn’t threaten violence against people; you know, although all you get is a fine, etc.

And so, of course, the lion takes the skeleton character through this kind of chain of events that happen, and you know, like this is essentially a series of increasingly severe punishments that ends with being shot if you resist strongly enough. So, yeah, it’s like taxation is certainly enabled by this ultimate threat of deadly force. I think that’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

And then the second objection was the idea of the social contract that this arrangement—you know, there are threats of violence, fair enough, but you’ve consented to them somehow because of this, this idea. And so I think, you know, I briefly talked about that idea, you know, I didn’t sign it, the kind of idea. And I don’t think that’s a very strong objection, so these is it to the idea of the social contract because you, you know, you do have examples of agreements which don’t require a signature; like, you know, restaurants, bobola.

I think the much stronger objection is that the state has no—it is not in a position to extend that offer to you to begin with; like it has no legitimate claim to the land you’re living on, the stuff you’re using. So, you know, it can say, you know, you can use this stuff and these are the conditions, but that—that’s in my—in my mind, at least, and I think in the minds of probably most volunteerists, that’s not—it’s not binding because the state is not—it has no right to do that in the first place. So even if you would—even if you would kind of agree, if you would say, okay, then you’re doing so under duress, and it’s an entity that has no—not no right to to make that demand from you in the first place.

So it’s, yeah, that’s—that’s what I put these at least.

Alright, so I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here. So the first thing I’ll say is, I—you know, when talking about this topic about, you know, you can always leave or, you know, it’s a social contract, the first thing is, well, you accepted it because once you came of age—I guess, what, 21 years old—you could have left and gone to another country, right? But since you chose to stay there, you are accepting of the terms of living. It’s like they say— it’s like living in a condo complex, you know? You have to pay your dues, and then you get services as a result. Okay, so it’s no different with the state. You pay your dues and you get services, so why are you complaining?

Yeah, okay, so the difference is that the state doesn’t own the land that you live on, so it’s, you know, it doesn’t get to even legitimately offer you those terms. Like it’s—it has no—it has nothing to bargain with legitimately, I think. So, you know, you can say that you can say you treat, you choose to stay, but now—unless you can show that the state does own the land, and not many people try and do that, even then, it’s kind of, this is all just hot air essentially.

Yeah, then—and then so I would say something like that, and then they would—and then the person would tell me, “Alright, so even if the state doesn’t own the land, try—try not paying your taxes and staying, and then just tell the state you don’t own the land.” You can get into trouble for sure. This isn’t—you know, this is like everyone knows this.

Yeah, this isn’t an attempt to persuasion even, right? It sounds like a—this is actually a threat.

Yeah, yeah, and so, to this person, it seems to me that morality has no bearing on their life. Like they just live so that they don’t die basically. It’s like it doesn’t think of the world in terms of morals, right? Because they think if they’re all—I’m paying my taxes so I don’t die or get imprisoned. But I’m like, or I guess—we were talking about, you know, not nihilists or, you know, or sociopaths; they don’t kill people not because they know they think it’s immoral, but because they might die in the process.

The only reason why they—

Right, right?

Yeah, I think, in my mind, most people who would make arguments like that. Yeah, I mean, I guess nihilist can be among them, but it’s also the case that people make arguments like that when they do have moral convictions, but they’re insufficiently interested in having a coherent set of moral ideas. I think that can happen too.

I guess I should say I’m a moral nihilist in the sense that I don’t believe there are—I don’t believe that moral facts exist in the sense of mind-independent aspects of the universe. But I do notice that I have very strong moral intuitions, and those are very important to me, and it’s also important that these moral intuitions cohere with each other. I can’t—I won’t tolerate, like, contradictions there, so yeah, I think you can go— you can go different ways in nihilism. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything’s okay if you can get away with it, which a lot of people do think.

Yeah, I’m pretty curious now because yeah, the way I understood nihilism anyways is in that sense, like subjective morality, like, you know, I don’t believe in good or bad or good or immoral or moral; I just think whatever is expedient to me and that doesn’t cause me harm now. And so, because usually I tend to talk about objective morality in the sense that it’s universalizable in the same sense that so the laws of economics cannot be violated without repercussions, consequences, right? And same thing with, you know, laws of, you know, mathematics, of planetary motion, of physics; you know, same thing with laws of economics, right? It cannot be violated without incurring consequences.

So in that sense, to me anyway, I look at that as being universal or, you know, objective morality.

So I guess—I guess I would disagree. To me, that sounds still like a, like a pragmatic, and it builds to pragmatism; like because it doesn’t catch the occasion that you, you know, this, you know, absurd hypothetical: again, really one popular person—no family has wronged you somehow. You could get away with killing them.

Yeah. You—this would, you know, this would be expedient for you for some reason. You know, maybe they would not interfere with some plan you have. If, like, you know, in this hypothetical, if you could be guaranteed somehow that you would then no one would ever know. And, you know, maybe that’s already—maybe that makes the hypothetical already sufficiently removed from reality that it’s not applicable, unless that—I’m open to that rebuttal.

But for me, it’s—it’s not really satisfying to me. I would, you know, in that situation, as someone who doesn’t believe in moral facts, I would certainly not kill this person unless they were, you know, trying to do the same to me, because it’s really, really important to me to—for my moral beliefs and actions to cohere.

And, you know, it kind of sounds very dry, but I—I mean, this is the language I use to describe what’s a really visceral response. Like it’s not okay! Like I feel that in the, you know, if you can say that in the core of my being, or in my heart or whatever metaphor you choose, like I feel that very, very strongly! And at the same time, I don’t believe that feeling has anything to do with moral facts. I believe that feeling is very probably a product of evolution, and I’m still not going to do it, you know? It doesn’t matter, because for me it’s so important not to mess that up! You know, not—not so that the moral cohesion is so important for me that I’m—that I’m still not gonna do it.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense to me. And so I’m kind of, you know, I guess I want you to—I want here an elaboration, because when you say that you’re a moral nihilist and then you describe yourself as a person that would not, you know, aggress against somebody even if you could get away with it, and you know, know what kinds of cancer whatever, you wouldn’t do it because it would be morally repugnant to you.

So in what way are you immoral nihilist then?

Yeah, so I think at least in my understanding of the term moral realists believe that there is such a thing as a moral fact, like there is such a thing as a—as a as a mind-independent, um, alt, you know? Like a— with a capital O—like you—you ought not do blah blah blah, you know, even if evolutionary history was different, maybe even if you could get away with it, etc. You know? In any situation, it would not be okay because it’s somehow part of the cosmos, you know? That it’s—it’s just— it’s just wrong, like it was a capital W.

And for me, that’s not the case. I don’t believe facts like that exist. I believe I’ve kind of inherited a bunch of wiring or, you know, that kind of stuff that makes me feel certain ways in certain situations, and some of those feelings are very, very strong. And I prefer for those actions and beliefs related to those favorite feelings to cohere with one another. And, like, the feeling of guilt is a very strong feeling that I want nothing to do with! I don’t want—I don’t want that! So moral nihilism is a philosophical stance; it certainly doesn’t mean that the person would be a dangerous or shifty or, you know, otherwise unpleasant a person to be around or to deal with.

But first, I would say that, yeah. So, I don’t know, I’m a very naïve moral nihilism might say, you know, if you can get away with it, do it. But I think that’s—that’s kind of—I think that’s pretty short-sighted. Like most people just feel bad doing stuff that they, you know, they find morally repugnant, and I think most people do find it morally repugnant to attack someone, you know, who’s not in the process of attacking them.

Yeah, a little bit because I mean, I mean, yeah, I guess, you know, the only thing—the only thing that’s important, you know, we can, like we talked about these things with people online and everything, and you know about, you know, the universality of morality and things like that, but I guess it all comes down to, you know, would you use violence to get what you want, alright? And that’s what it comes down to, right?

And if you wouldn’t, then you’re essentially a peaceful individual regardless of the semantics in the terminology we call each other.

Yeah, absolutely! I would—I would much prefer to live in a community of voluntary Catholics, for instance, than atheists or theists, for sure.

Even, even, you know, even if they believe that it’s primarily a threat of punishment by the universe, you know, the creator of the universe, which is keeping them from doing bad things to me, you know? I don’t really mind.

Yeah, for a long time, I thought that was a contradiction, you know, a Christian voluntarist, you know, because it’s all about—like, there’s no, you know, no masters, no slaves, no rulers, right? No subjects. But I interviewed a voluntarist Christian, and, you know, was talking about that, and, you know, again, like I think Jesus, some of the—a lot of the things he said were very, you know, libertarian, if not, if not volunteerism. Like, you know, he never advocated for a welfare state, right? Maybe, you know, he advocated for charity, but not a welfare state.

I guess for me the, the kind of—I guess complaints or worry about religion in general, our, you know, organized religion, then that I still find compelling and a worry is the—the religious texts which are found so important do seem extremely malleable. Like, you can—they contain a lot of contradiction, so, you know, as long as these texts are being revered, there’s room for bad stuff to happen in the future by people who are sufficiently convinced that these are the words of the creator of the universe. And I’m sympathetic to that argument of that worry.

Mhm, yeah, yeah! Like when I was growing up in high school, I did a lot of reading into world religions, and I’m not religious myself, but I didn’t grow up with any religion, but I would study a lot of world religions independent of my government school. And yeah, I did—I did kind of conclude that there’s, you know, just reading the Bible a little bit. I see it none as a—as a factual text but as a literary text as a novel, you know, with conviction, and there’s a lot of violence, a lot of bloodshed, a lot of genocide, a lot of killing, you know? And to me, God seems to be more like, you know, a jealous ex-girlfriend, you know, snooping and just, you know, it’s always envied what you thought, what are you saying about you worshiping somebody else? Like, you seeing somebody else—that is a really bad role model.

But yeah, so I have come to realize that, by far, the religious of statism is by far much more dangerous than any kind of organized religion has ever been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Larkin Rose did a great job with this. I don’t know if you have—you read that book The Most Dangerous Superstition?

I haven’t. I’ve heard about it a lot.

Yeah, does a great job with that one. So, um, so yeah. So if there’s anything else that you want to, you know, plug your YouTube channel, your website, anything else you want to mention to the listeners before we sign off?

Yeah, it’s a good question. Sure, that there ought to be something. So just, well, just the YouTube channel, right in the—the one that we—the website and the Facebook and any other—any other projects that you’re working in at the moment?

Yeah, so, um, so I’m making a quite different thing, like a local multiplayer racing game with anarcho-capitalists at all.

No, I haven’t found a way to work that in. I do want to do I want to do something along those lines, though I want to combine those things, but I haven’t found, like something that seems like a viable plan yet. It seems like everything I’ve considered seems to be too much kind of shoehorning one thing into another, but I haven’t given up yet. Still, still have that in the back of my mind.

Apart from that, I’m working on a three-part series about Bitcoin called Bitcoin for the Intelligent Layperson.

Are you—you posted one of those, right?

Okay, for the first—the first part one is online right now and it’s kind of—it’s intended to be a thing that kind of fills the gap between, like, the most basic of the basic video primers about Bitcoin and the more hardcore technical things. It’s kind of—it helps to, I hope it lands kind of somewhere in between, so for people who aren’t quite satisfied with, you know, the usual things you hear about Bitcoin, but aren’t necessarily familiar with, you know, the language of the technology surrounding cryptography. So, yeah, I hope that that will be useful for people to learn more about it. I think it’s a super important development and will continue to become more so.

Yeah, yeah, I love talking about Bitcoin to some people. It’s a great—I think that’s a great introduction to maybe talking about volunteerism. Like, with me, when I talk to people and I start usually talking about monetary economics, like I don’t mention, you know, anarchist; I don’t mention, you know, the government is illegitimate or, you know taxation is theft, because a lot of those things can have, you know, emotional responses that are not too pleasant. So, yeah, monetary economics, talking about money—talking about central banks, talking about Bitcoin, you know, those tend to be more neutral topics and don’t really enrage people, yeah.

Yeah, that’s a good—it’s a good way in—in that sense, I suppose. I like in my—in my work, I kind of like to do the contrarian thing and to say stuff which I wholeheartedly believe but stuff which I also know that many people are gonna be like, what? What? How can you—how can you say such a thing? Like, I guess, I guess it has that in common with, like, Walter Block’s book, right, Defending the Great.

Yeah, I really—I’m really attracted to that approach as well, I guess. Yeah, I guess I like that—like I suppose I like the adversarial component of talking about this stuff too. And maybe that’s not strategically the most useful thing, but yeah, I definitely enjoy it, and I learn a lot from it.

So you’re saying you don’t take the approach to make more friends? You say, “Me? I have too many friends! I’m looking for ways to lose them!”

You say the most subversive things in the softest, gentlest voice possible!

Yes, something like that! Actually, something like that! And, you know, you could see this stuff as a kind of filter. You know, like the people who— the people who make it through this stuff and still want to be—I want to associate with you somehow that they’re okay! Like, you know, that’s a good one. They have, like, some tough moral skin; they’re willing to think about things a little more seriously, perhaps, or a little more carefully, or even just a postponed judgment, because that’s—that’s also a rare enough thing.

Yeah, people who might disagree with me quite strongly, but don’t write me off as a person on the basis of that, I think that’s—that’s pretty valuable.

Yeah, before you explain your economic analysis of why minimum wage is immoral, they see you just hate people!

What?

Yeah, explain!

Yeah, so I mean, in my non-internet life, I’m surrounded by people who are, to some degree at least, implicit statists, I think. You know, they believe on some—in some level in the—in the—the kind of necessity of the state—that’s—that’s this may be—it varies from place to place, I guess, because I guess if you live in New Hampshire, for instance, that’s—that’s a different thing entirely. They suppose that’s also gonna have an effect on how you choose to design what you want to say.

I have my friends in the back of my mind when I’m making stuff, so I suppose that—I suppose that feeds into that. It’s been feeds into it somewhere.

So, so, um, alright, so you said the Bitcoin is a three-part series, right?

Yeah!

Alright, so maybe when you finish that, maybe we can have you back on. We can have a discussion about Bitcoin. That would be great! That’s a great topic to—I, you know, it’s pretty complex, and it’s very interesting. I like talking about that as well.

Awesome conversation, Tomas! Thank you!

Likewise! Okay, beautiful topics, I really, really enjoyed it! So, yeah, hopefully we’ll get you back on! Do you know when you might get that done?

Only by the end of the year or maybe longer. I don’t—disappointment only brings pain. We don’t make—I don’t like to make plans because then I just get disappointed.

So thank you very much!

So this is Peaceful Anarchism—oh, by the way, if anybody wants to donate, you can donate through PayPal or Bitcoin, although PayPal is getting a little sketchy, but so far that’s all I got. If you wanted—if you want to send gold and silver, by all means, try. I don’t really trust the USPS, but you can try. So be my guest. Send me some value; we’ll find a way to receive it.

So thanks a lot, everyone! Thank you, Tomas! I really appreciate it! So this is Peaceful Anarchism on the Voluntary Virtues Network, TheConsciousResistance.com, and TheSeedsOfLiberty.com wishing everyone a wonderful day! Take care! Bye!