Mondays With Murray: The State Thrives On Fear And Guilt
From education to central banking the State maintains control over institutions and industries by inculcating people with fear and inducing citizens to feel guilt when they stray from the State’s prescribed path.Fear holds us back individually and as a society. Fear of failure can stop us from taking risks. If you cannot overcome fear you’ll never start that new business, ask out that girl, or speak out about an intrusive government.Fear is the friend of those who ascend to positions of power within the State. The majority of people cannot imagine a society where education, banking, energy, water, welfare, transportation, and national defense are not heavily regulated or even fully nationalized entities of the State. We are fed propaganda continuously by the media and government officials which instructs us that we would be doomed if the State ceased to control these areas. A state can demonize the rulers of other States in order to rally support for foreign entanglements that otherwise could be regarded as wars or disagreements between the ruling classes of each State.Rothbard describes in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
The rule of the State is thus made to seem inevitable. Furthermore, any alternative to the existing State is encased in an aura of fear. Neglecting its own monopoly of theft and predation, the State raises the spectre among its subjects of the chaos that would supposedly ensue if the State should disappear. The people on their own, it is maintained, could not possibly supply their own protection against sporadic criminals and marauders. Furthermore, each State has been particularly successful over the centuries in instilling fear among its subjects of other State rulers. With the land area of the globe now parcelled out among particular States, one of the basic doctrines and tactics of the rulers of each State has been to identify itself with the territory it governs. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its population [p. 58] with the State is a means of making natural patriotism work to the State's advantage. If, then, "Ruritania" is attacked by "Walldavia," the first task of the Ruritanian State and its intellectuals is to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack is really upon them, and not simply upon their ruling class. In this way, a war between rulers is converted into a war between peoples, with each people rushing to the defense of their rulers in the mistaken belief that the rulers are busily defending them. This device of nationalism has been particularly successful in recent centuries; it was not very long ago, at least in Western Europe, when the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles and their retinues.
States throughout history have experienced tremendous growth by using fear to paralyze the public. Another method that the State will repeatedly lean upon for support is the infusion of guilt.Governments are quick to attack accumulations of wealth by individuals and corporations in the private sector. The State labels those that seek to grow their own private funds and businesses as being selfish or greedy. Statists cry out that these “unnecessary” riches must be redistributed back into the hands of the public in the name of the “common good.” Somehow the State is never called greedy, even though the amount that is confiscated from the private sector and the total budgets of State agencies swell in size and scope every single year.Rothbard continues in For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
Another tried and true method for bending subjects to one's will is the infusion of guilt. Any increase in private well-being can be attacked as "unconscionable greed," "materialism," or "excessive affluence"; and mutually beneficial exchanges in the market can be denounced as "selfish." Somehow the conclusion always drawn is that more resources should be expropriated from the private sector and siphoned into the parasitic "public," or State, sector. Often the call upon the public to yield more resources is couched in a stern call by the ruling elite for more "sacrifices" for the national or the common weal. Somehow, however, while the public is supposed to sacrifice and curtail its "materialistic greed," the sacrifices are always one way. The State does not sacrifice; the State eagerly grabs more and more of the public's material resources. Indeed, it is a useful rule of thumb: when your ruler calls aloud for "sacrifices," look to your own life and pocketbook!
The guilt trip is in full effect with regard to the State’s obsession with regulating industry with hopes to halt “climate change” and the standardization of the education for youths. The State reasons that if you don’t support State coercion as a method to stop climate change, then you must hate the planet. If you don’t want more centrally planned education initiatives, then you must hate the children.As I talked about in a previous installment of Mondays With Murray, the State and their allies enjoy a double standard of morality. Rothbard goes on to describe how this double standard is structured.
This sort of argumentation reflects a general double standard of morality that is always applied to State rulers but not to anyone else. No one, for example, is surprised or horrified to learn that businessmen are seeking higher profits. No one is horrified if workers leave lower-paying for higher-paying jobs. All this is considered proper and normal behavior. But if anyone should dare assert that politicians and bureaucrats are motivated by the desire to maximize their incomes, the hue and cry of "conspiracy theorist" or "economic determinist" spreads throughout the land. The general opinion — carefully cultivated, of course, by the State itself — is that men enter politics or government purely out of devoted concern for the common good and the public weal. What gives the gentlemen of the State apparatus their superior moral patina? Perhaps it is the dim and instinctive knowledge of the populace that the State is engaged in systematic theft and predation, and they may feel that only a dedication to altruism on the part of the State makes these actions tolerable. To consider politicians and bureaucrats [p. 59] subject to the same monetary aims as everyone else would strip the Robin Hood veil from State predation. For it would then be clear that, in the Oppenheimer phrasing, ordinary citizens were pursuing the peaceful, productive "economic means" to wealth, while the State apparatus was devoting itself to the coercive and exploitative organized "political means." The emperor's clothes of supposed altruistic concern for the common weal would then be stripped from him.
Thousands of years of history have provided the State with a road map to grow power with the least possible resistance. The mantra of the Statist is to keep the population living in fear and to convince the people to seek solutions from the State in order to relieve guilt.If you're craving more Murray, you can read all of the previous editions of Mondays with Murray by visiting the full archive page!Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!
