Google Stefan Molyneux. He has over a thousand videos, and a book I believe, out there. He should not be hard to find, and I have only viewed three hours of his content, so cannot be certain I want to place a link on our network page. He will show up on the YouTube suggested views whenever you go to Peter Joseph’s Culture in Decline.
I do not know anything about this man, who seems an anti-philosopher with a serene Euro-psyche gift for voiceover. He appears to me to be Archie Bunker’s nightmare sun-in-law updated for the 21st Century.
I clicked on the two hour video referenced above in the subtitle out of curiosity, despite the fact that I had only 30 minutes to go before my weekly Orwellian naptime. I cracked open a beer and sank into a hypnotic lethargy as the surreal film played by at classic zombie speed, accompanied by the abovementioned Euro-psyche voiceover of Stefan. Yet I did not fall asleep, tired as I was. The narrator kept me awake if not entirely alive…
When I was 14 tender years of age, two of my friends were arguing about theology, souls, the afterlife, etc. I was called in to judge between the atheist and the evangelist. I declared that I believed the evangelist; that there was a higher power. Then, as he turned smugly on the now ostracized atheist, I added the caveat that I regarded earth to be a farm, and the embodied souls upon it nothing but livestock, to be fed into the maw of some omnipotent evil; that in the end we were just food for something bigger. I have, since then, toned down the metaphysical aspect of this model and have applied it, as an adult counter-culture thinker, to human society. I have believed since I was a boy that I was livestock, being fattened for some fate other than my own good.
I was oh so intrigued to find a philosophical YouTube piece that seemed to promote this very theory. This Stefan character seems to be some kind of godless French-Canadian hippie who had his hair singed off by a Neocon cultist. Although he is pictured in many of his other videos, this one features just his troublingly serene voiceover. I could well imagine him empting a room of Christian conservatives with an irreverent whisper.
The video—all two hours of it—are provided by two dreadful World War Two propaganda films: a full length American ‘Okie feeds the war-machine’ affair, and a half hour ‘honor the war-dead through civic duty’ British newsreel. The video is the background and the voice the foreground. The strange hypnotic dichotomy of what is being said and what is being shown works. You get the sense that your mind is being screwed by the film, and that this is being confirmed and justified by the narrator.
The narrator spends the entire two hours maintaining the fiction that you are the next president, the next tax farmer, the ‘Smiling Face of The Fist of Power’. He starts out by assuring you that you, as a tax farmer, are no more necessary for the progress of the farm than a hood ornament is for the progress of the automobile. He then proceeds to explain your lineage of power from cannibal chief to chief executive, and goes on to prescribe various tried-and-true tactics for keeping your human livestock productive and submissive.
In many ways this is a masterpiece. The effect is profoundly Orwellian. I suppose I like it more than Peter Joseph’s work on a theoretical level, because it keeps with the same ‘people are painfully stupid’ line of reasoning that our rulers abide by. It does not, however, approach the wit and production values of Mister Joseph’s work. I would like to see these two make a movie, where Stefan plays the evil seductive adviser of the Tax Farmer in some Orwellian dystopia, and Peter plays the latest Tax Farmer to ascend to power. That would really work.
The Handbook of Human Ownership offers dozens of keen insights into the human condition. I will be returning to it as a source for my science-fiction. I definitely recommend it for those who are suspicious of our world order and would like to peek beneath the surface with a soft, serene, cynical voice for a guide.
