If my prison guards hit me with truncheons, I must obey them. If I accept that I obey them because they hit me with truncheons, I feel terribly humiliated and helpless, but retain an accurate assessment of the situation. On the other hand, I can choose to reduce my humiliation by imagining not that I comply because I am hit, but rather that I am hit because I disobey. It is not my noncompliance with the guard’s whims that gets me beaten, but rather my noncompliance with moral virtues. The guards do not beat me because they are sadistic – I am beaten because I am evil. The guards are not responsible for beating me – I am responsible for being beaten. The guards are not trying to humiliate me; they are trying to help me, to make me a better person, just as the doctor is trying to help me by making me healthy again.
Do you see how the agony of moral corruption can be transferred from one person to another?
– Stefan Molyneux, On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion
Yeah. Ouch.
Tags: prison, Stefan Molyneux, tyranny
