Episode #035 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Alright. So, I want to begin the show today by asking you guys a question—I don’t know—I’m pretty sure none of you guys have asked yourself this before. You ready? Who owns you? Who owns your body? I mean you as a spiritual being or as a mind that operates this body, this bag of chemicals that you’re walking around in—who owns that bag of chemicals? Do you think you own it? Why, just because you live in it? You can live in a one-bedroom apartment. That doesn’t make it yours. I mean, if you don’t pay your rent, eventually the cops are going to come get you out of it. But nobody can really kick you out of your body, can they? So, who do you pay rent to? You know, as a spirit or a mind that’s occupying this bag of chemicals, who’s your landlord? Do you set up some sort of rent-to-own program?

Now, this question is pretty ridiculous. Admittedly, it’s ridiculous. And as interesting as it is to think about, really the only purpose of it is just trying to get you to admit that your body is a part of who you are. When you are born, your body, and you, for that matter, whatever that is, are self-owned. Figuratively speaking, there is this, like, a bill of sale, there’s a deed to your body that’s signed over to you, and you possess it. And you exist in this role of self-ownership. It’s pretty clear, if that’s the case, you’re entitled to your body at birth. But is that the only thing that you’re entitled to at birth? What else are you entitled to simply by virtue of being born? Now, that’s a question that’s pretty interesting to think about for a while.

And by the way, as these thought experiments that we start to delve into get more and more relevant and they start to be more modern and relatable, maybe the best way to listen to this show might be, when a philosopher asks a question, or if I ask a question, to just pause the show and think about it for a while. Brainstorm it. You can get in that habit of thinking about things philosophically. I don’t know.

But all that said, let’s say that you own your body; you’re in this state of self-ownership. Does that mean that you have control over it? And if so, how much control? I mean, after all, there’s tons of things that we own that we don’t have full control over. I mean, just because you’re an 80-year-old lady with a car that has a sticky gas pedal, that doesn’t entitle you to complete control over it. I mean, you can’t drive it through a 7-Eleven, for example. These are all good questions to think about.

And now that we’ve asked all of them, now that we’ve gotten our mind to this place, I want to tell you guys something. I want to tell the listeners of the program Philosophize This! something that’s going to blow your mind. You are not entitled to complete control over your body. Look, it’s common knowledge that 6,000 years ago when the Lord with his eternal grace put the very first human on planet earth—his name was Adam—he gave Adam dominion over all of the fish and foul on planet earth. I’m sure you’ve read that passage from the Bible. God said, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Now, God gave this guy Adam a pretty daunting task if you think about it. I mean, he essentially gave him dominion over every living thing that moves on the earth. Well, one very small part of all of those living things is you and me. Well, I guess, more importantly, part of all those living things on planet earth were Adam’s kids. And let’s not forget about the fifth commandment, guys: honor thy father and mother. We are not born free. We are born as subjects of our father who we’re beholden to. The first and most natural form of government, if you’re a human being living under the God of the Old Testament in this natural world, is a monarchy. This is the most natural form of government. It’s the system of government that God himself initially laid out. It’s the one that we are the most used to. We are born unfree, and we should stay that way. You guys agree with that?

Now, not to shock you guys, but I don’t actually believe all this stuff I just said. This was the basic position of a 17th-century political theorist named Sir Robert Filmer. And if you couldn’t tell, he was a huge supporter of the monarchy. He put it this way, “The first government in the world was monarchical in the father of all flesh, Adam being commanded to people and multiply the earth, and to subdue it, and having dominion given him over all creatures, was thereby the monarch of the whole world: none of his posterity had any right to possess any thing, but by his grant or permission, or by succession from him: The earth, sayeth the psalmist, hath he given to the children of men, which shows the title comes from fatherhood.”

This position that Filmer’s laying out is known as patriarchalism. The king or monarch of a particular government serves the role of the father, and we as the people should be subservient to him and kind of like his children. Well, as we’ve talked about before, this time period that we’re talking about is full of all sorts of intellectual battles going on. And the one that was probably the most relevant to us today, the one that impacted us the most, was this battle of which political system is the most appropriate. And one of the guys that was putting his life on the line day after day, constantly running from people and fighting against monarch rule was a guy named John Locke. He’s the guy we’re going to be talking about today.

Now, if you live in the United States, or most modern nations for that matter, you’re very familiar with the political philosophy of John Locke. It was what the founding fathers used as a framework when building the Constitution—well, him along with Montesquieu, but we’ll get there. The important part for us to take from this soliloquy that I started the show with is that each and every day that you wake up and you go to your job in the 21st century, you are still feeling the effects of this battle that we’re about to talk about, this battle that John Locke fought way back in the 1600s. I mean, look, we think of a battle field. We’ve all seen videos of huge explosions, hopefully not in person. And these explosions are incredibly dramatic and scary, and they affect us in a weird way. But there are very few bombs in the history of man that still affect people centuries after they were initially dropped. And this bomb of political theory set off by John Locke in the 1600s—who, by the way, spent most of his life on the run and scared just to be able to drop it—we are living politically in modern times in the shock wave of that bomb. That’s how huge this was.

So, the ideas themselves that we’re talking about today, we’re all going to be familiar with. And look, it’s easy just to write them off on that basis alone. You say, oh, I’ve already heard about that. I already know about that. I can just tune out this episode. But look, context is everything. And if we understand how John Locke arrived at these ideas and where he shone his lantern of reason through the darkness to develop this system, it can give us some very nice insights into the modern world that we’re living in. When John Locke wrote his Two Treatises on Government, which is where we get his political philosophy—his second one was the one that was a huge influence on the founding fathers—when he wrote both of these treatises, he was responding directly to Sir Robert Filmer and his defense of patriarchalism. His Second Treatise on Government was a direct counterattack in this intellectual war zone.

To put it lightly, Locke thought that the idea that we were born unfree children under the dominion of some father figure was complete trash. He attacks the argument of Filmer on two different fronts and, in my opinion, completely destroys it. One, Filmer’s interpretation of God pronouncing Adam as the monarch-steward over every living thing on planet earth—he thought that was a pathetic distortion of reality. Locke says that when God said all that stuff—when he said to fill the earth, subdue it, rule over all the fish of the sea and the dragons and all the stuff that you have to rule over—he says that if you read the Bible properly, if you actually pay attention to the context of what he’s saying, it’s glaringly obvious that he wasn’t talking to Adam in particular.

God was talking to all of mankind. God pronounced the human species as stewards over the land, not a single guy named Adam who we’re perpetually in the service of. He points to all different examples, and he really does destroy his argument, but not the least of which was he points to the actual commandment that Filmer referenced—honor thy father and mother, you know? There is no patriarch in that system. And for that matter, honoring your parents is much different than being born a piece of their property.

Well, a common argument back to his argument would be, but what about the fact that we’re all born completely helpless? As infants, we can’t really do much for ourselves. We’re kind of just cute little bundles wrapped in a pink blanket. We need our parents to take care of us, or we’re going to die. Are we really born free if that’s the case there? I mean, don’t we need our parents? And Locke says, yes, we need our parents. But we are born free. We just aren’t able to exercise it yet. And he gives a really good counterexample.

It’s similar to our ability to reason, he says. As humans, we possess an innate faculty of an ability to reason. Not many people would argue with that. But as infants, we really have no way of exercising it yet. What are we going to reason about, like what kind of baby food we’re going to eat? But Locke’s point is, would you say that we’re born irrational creatures by nature? Or would you say that we are rational creatures that just don’t have the ability to express it yet? He uses this example to make the case for why we’re obviously not born unfree. He says, “Thus we are born free, as we are born rational; not that we have actually the exercise of either: age, that brings one, brings with it the other two. And thus we see how natural freedom and subjection to parents may consist together, and are both founded on the same principle.”

Now, the implications of this are huge, alright? So, if we’re not born into a world instantly under the control of some other person, as Filmer laid out, then in a sense, we are created equal. We are self-owned machines. So, on one end, Locke completely destroys Filmer’s argument by claiming that he drastically misinterpreted the Bible. You were completely wrong in the way that you interpreted this passage. But look, let’s say that you didn’t misinterpret the Bible so badly. You’re still wrong. You were flawed from the start, Filmer. We shouldn’t look to things like the Bible to determine what system of government we have. Locke thinks that the Bible is good for a lot of things, but when it comes to finding out what system of government we should manage ourselves with, reason is much better for that.

Locke talks about how we misuse the Bible at times. He talks about all these things that theologians claim is divine revelation laid out in the Bible that reason could never arrive at alone. He just doesn’t think that’s true. He has this really great section where he uses an example—the same example we talked about before—that God at some point in history made this declaration that we as the human species are hereby kings over all of the animals of the earth and that we should eat them. Well, John Locke goes, why do you even need God to say that to arrive at that conclusion? Do we?

If you believe that God created us, if you believe that a God created you, then you must also believe that he created all the processes of your body too. And the fact that we have innately such a strong desire to live, the fact that we get hungry, the fact that we want to eat all those other creatures of the earth—that alone should show you that eating those animals is a behavior that God endorses. And the significance of this has nothing to do with you being a vegetarian, alright? The significance is that now we can use reason and our place in the natural world to determine what correct behavior is. And it’s a much better system to Locke. Because if you use reason, you don’t need to worry about misinterpreting, like, some obscure Tweet that God Tweeted out 2,000 years ago. You don’t got to misread that and live your life incorrectly.

And he’s very clear about this. He talks about the different ways God could have created the world but didn’t. Why didn’t he? This world is a very deliberate construct of this creator. So, what that means is that if somebody like Descartes can measure things in the natural world, and he can find these mathematical constants and try to arrive at a universal mathematical system; if also people can study substances in the natural world and they can study how they react to each other, and they can arrive at a system of chemistry that’s measurable; if other people can study events in the natural world and come up with a system of meteorology, is it really that crazy to think that we could study our place within the natural world and come up with a system of ethics, or a political system for that matter? Doesn’t seem that crazy.

You know, this is a tough pill for people to swallow in modern times sometimes because people are usually given a system of ethics; it’s a gift. All kinds of examples of this. Some people sit around on the couch, and they watch TV a lot. And they see somebody on TV that they admire, and they idolize them; and they want to emulate their behavior. They want their life to resemble Don Draper’s life, so they start trying to emulate his behavior. People are told in church all the time that God chose these behaviors for you to do them, and if you don’t do them, it’s going to cost you.

But this isn’t always how it was. Thinkers for a long time wondered to themselves, what do we base our system of ethics on? If we’re trying to come up with the best way to live, what do we base that on? It can’t be arbitrary. And just as a thought experiment, just imagine that TV and the Bible didn’t exist for a second. If you were forced to start your own ethical doctrine—you needed to come up with a system of behaviors—where would you start? What behaviors would matter to you? You know, certain things we know that we feel. Like, we hate it when somebody steals something from us, right? But what would you use as a basis for making the claim, if that was part of your ethical system, that stealing is wrong? What would you use as a basis for that?

Well, lucky for us, we’ve already talked about several examples of this: the Epicureans from the Hellenistic age, for example. They looked for a certain default human behavior. If you remember, they said that from the very moment you’re born, one thing seems to be certain, and that’s that you avoid pain and seek out pleasure. We can measure this. If you go up to a newborn infant and you pinch its skin—by the way, don’t actually try that at home—if you pinch the skin of a newborn baby, it retracts. It pulls its arm away out of instinct. Now, from that, the Epicureans were able to say, okay, pain seems to be something that’s bad to humans, and we always strive towards pleasure. So, from that, they decided that pleasure was the ultimate good. And from there, it’s just a matter of you truly knowing what brings you pleasure in the long term as opposed to what you just think brings you pleasure in the short term. Again, they asked, what does it mean to be a human being living in this natural world? Oh, it’s an aversion to pain. Let’s develop an ethical system around it. But this is just one example of many.

Well, back in the 17th century, there were several thinkers, including Thomas Hobbes, who we’ve already talked about, and John Locke, who thought that by using reason to analyze human nature and our place in the natural world, certain universal truths can be deduced from it. This system—this is important—this is what is known as natural law. And we’ve already talked about natural law a little bit. Hobbes laid out his own natural law. But this is the premise behind it.

Now, the rest of this episode is going to focus on what this natural law is to John Locke, but let’s put this giant umbrella of justification over all the rest of this. Just like a law can be on the books in today’s world and that law is essentially worthless if no police are actually enforcing it—just like that, this system of natural law can exist, and it is essentially worthless if there’s nobody there to enforce it. Locke said, “Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.”

So, when put the most broadly, this is the role of government to John Locke, to preserve the rights afforded to us by natural law—all of them. Now, this is much different than the other political theorist we’ve talked about, Thomas Hobbes. They’re commonly compared because they focused on such similar issues, but they were so different from each other. Remember, Hobbes thought the role of government was to maintain stability, to prevent chaos. And as individuals, we didn’t have any unalienable rights. We just had a will to survive. Many of the rights that we did have in a state of nature were handed over to the Leviathan in the interest of self-preservation.

The government’s job to John Locke is to protect our natural rights. Now, the important part for us is, what are those rights? Well, put the most broadly: life, liberty, and property. You ever wonder why those rights are touted as being so unalienable? It’s because the foundation of them is based on what was seen as a universal truth derived from nature.

So, we started out the show today by asking who owns your body. Who owns you? Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of us said that we feel as though we are self-owned. We own ourselves, and with it we have a sense of autonomy that comes with that. Autonomy is referring to our ability to make decisions for ourself not coerced by some other individual or group. We’re not slaves to somebody else. So, we have the life we were given, the liberty to control that life, but John Locke thinks we’re entitled to one more thing—property.

Now, let’s be entirely clear. John Locke is not saying that you’re entitled to a piece of property. You’re not entitled to a house when you’re born. You’re not entitled to a yacht when you turn 16 years old. When you use your life to exercise your liberty to provide for yourself and you labor hard and you create something that improves your lot in life, John Locke thinks you are entitled to the fruits of your labor. Now, this is an interesting point, one that’s caused, for the record, a lot of backlash over the years. And as people living in a modern capitalistic society that’s modeled after the philosophy of John Locke, we might not even think about it. But ask yourself this question. Why are you necessarily entitled to what you create? Why is that yours now?

Well, maybe the best way to understand why John Locke feels this way is to consider the alternatives. Look around you for a second. Everything you own, everything you consider to be the fruits of your labor was at one point in its history a natural resource harvested from the earth in some way. Let me look around. Books—they’re made out of paper which comes from trees. Cell phone—your cell phone is made out of a bunch of electrical components and the tears of some factory worker in a third world country. We exist in a world, whether we like it or not, where using that natural right of liberty when trying to provide for ourselves forces us to use the natural resources of the world. We have no choice. If we don’t want to starve to death, we need to use what’s around us to survive.

Look, just because you look around you and none of this stuff looks like it came from nature, none of this stuff just magically appeared one day. It’s some natural resource that’s been doctored and processed by a factory down to provide some useful purpose to you. All this stuff comes from the earth. So, if we are forced to use the resources of the world, it begs the question, who owns those resources? I mean, really, what good is your life and liberty if you’re born into a world where there’s no resources to use. You’re just going to die. But the more relevant question for us is not who owns these resources but who controls them.

Well, there are actually a lot of possible answers to this question. And it’s fun to brainstorm and try to think of a method that we could use today that would be fair to everybody and allows some level of control over them. But just for the sake of this show and time, let me talk about a few of the common ideas. So, how do we manage these resources? One possibility is that we assign a group of people to be the overseers of these resources. Now, as difficult or impractical as that may sound, these people would essentially catalog all the resources that people could provide for themselves with—everything on earth: all the trees, the rocks, the sand, the dirt, coal mines, gold mines, everything. And then they’d be assigned the task to perfectly and equally distribute one part to each and every person living. That sounds fair. I mean, that way, nobody goes without the tools they need to be able to exercise their liberty to provide for themselves.

Now, the common argument against this one is that it is horrendously ineffective in practice. You could find a hundred reasons, really. But how about the fact that all men are created equal, but not all natural resources are created equal? There’s going to be some people that get just a field full of dirt and trash, and then some other people get a mine full of gold and silver. How could that be evenly distributed? And look, even if it could be implemented in real life, let’s not forget about the idea that in this model we are handing over complete control over the resources of the world to a very small handful of people. And I think we’ve seen how that pans out. Human nature doesn’t really go along with that one.

Well, another common recommendation of dealing with this resource problem is, why does there even need to be a controller at all? This is another option. Why can’t we just all take whatever we want, whenever we want, when we need it? Well, aside from the giant environmental catastrophes that could occur if we just allowed for the unrestricted extraction of whatever resource you want whenever you want it, aside from that, the biggest attack on this method of managing it is that it’s just not consistent with human nature in reality, kind of like the last one.

You can’t be mad at people that think this way because they’re usually really compassionate people. They’re usually really farsighted people that are content with what they have. But the problem is, Hitler didn’t invade Czechoslovakia because of scarcity, alright? He didn’t continue into Poland and France because his people were incapable of surviving on the resources that they already had. His goal was conquest and glory. And this is an important element of humanity that we need to consider. Let’s not project how we would act in a given situation onto the totality of the human race, you know?

There are selfish, greedy, bad people in the world. It’s not like we’re not locking these bad people up. But even with an overcrowded prison population, there’s still enough people that are willing to infringe upon your property that you have a car alarm on your car, right? You don’t want somebody to steal your car. It’s a possibility. You have locks on your doors. This is far from a profound statement, but people willing to do terrible things in the name of their own self-interest exist, whether we like that reality or not. Making every resource on earth uncontrolled doesn’t force people to go along with the system. And another common point against it is it also doesn’t give your neighbor much of an incentive to remain productive if at any point in the day he can just come over and use your pots and pans whenever he wants, because technically they aren’t yours.

This issue of productivity is a huge issue to people of Locke’s time. We need to keep these resources productive. We don’t want somebody hoarding a bunch of resources and doing nothing with them, saving them for a rainy day. Just for the record, this is the basis for a lot of modern advocates of taxing private property—this is usually aligned with the democrat party nowadays in the United States—where if you own a piece of land, you pay tax on that piece of land on a regular basis. And the thinking is that by having to pay that amount, you’re going to be forced to try to use that piece of land, keep it productive, make money, employ people. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to be able to pay those taxes. As opposed to the other side that thinks that you own something, and you do whatever you want with it. If you want your land to be a vacant lot, that’s your freedom. Very difficult issue with tons of debate on either side, but it stems from this basic question.

Alright, but Locke proposes a different solution to the problem. His idea is that we have the natural right to our life and liberty to move around as we please and work to provide for ourselves. His idea was that you have a natural right to the fruits of your labor. The thinking was that this is a good system. It motivates people to work hard if they want a lot of stuff, and it allows for people that just want to get by to just get by. One other good point is that it doesn’t put complete control over how productive the resources are being in the hands of a small group of people. In fact, if somebody wants to put the resources to use, they can. The only thing stopping them is their will to get up and do the work.

So, a little later on in history, a political theorist named Claude-Frédéric Bastiat summed up the next part of this pretty well. He said, “Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” So, here’s what Locke and Bastiat are getting at—all the stuff we just talked about. Now we have a basis for why just by virtue of being born, to John Locke, we are entitled to three things: life, liberty, and the fruits of our labor. However hard we choose to work, that’s what we get. But if these are natural rights afforded to us that we discovered by using reason to look at our place within nature, then just like we talked about before, that natural law is pointless if there isn’t some police officer to enforce it.

The reality is, guys, there are bad people out there, people that would take the fruits of your labor in a heartbeat if there was nothing protecting you. And look, you can say, “I got something for them boys. I got me some firearms.” Well, what if these bad people start a gang and group together? Sure, you can handle a few of them with your little defensive advantage that you have in your house. You know the property. But can you take a 30 to 40-person gang by yourself? What if they’re highly trained because this is how they get everything? Could you singlehandedly defeat ISIS? You can’t. It’s impossible. Really the only solution to this problem is to be protected by a more highly trained, well-equipped gang of people to protect your natural rights: your life, your liberty to not be handcuffed to a drainpipe somewhere, and your property—the fruits of your labor and the manifestation of your liberty to provide for yourself. This is why government exists, to John Locke, to protect your natural rights of life, liberty, and property.

Really early in life, John Locke was actually an advocate of a monarchy. It’s pretty ironic. But as you read his works—as his life progresses and he educates himself more and he starts talking to certain people—he gets more and more radical in this direction that we’ve been talking about. And look, make no mistake, these were radical ideas at the time. Look, we’re going to talk a lot about his life on the run from these people next episode. But rest assured in knowing that he was running for a very real reason. This gradual movement throughout his entire life—it came to a climax right near the end of his life when he advocated a position that at his time was downright revolutionary.

See, Thomas Hobbes talked about the state of nature. He said that when we’re in this state of nature where we don’t have any restrictions, that’s great, but we also don’t have things like unalienable rights, so to speak. Someone can kill you in the state of nature, and it really can’t be considered wrong because there’s no system of laws in place that deems it to be bad. The ultimate goal in the state of nature is survival. You can do anything you want if it means you’re going to survive. Hobbes says that to leave that state of nature, we forfeit most of the rights to the sovereign, to the Leviathan. And his job is to maintain order. John Locke on the other hand, as we now know, says that the role of government is to protect the natural rights of its citizens. So, this makes him conclude that if the government is not serving the people as it should be, that the citizens underneath it have every right to change it or even overthrow it completely.

Find out what happens on the next episode of Philosophize This! I’ll talk to you soon.