"Phase One: Indoctrination
The first phase is to indoctrinate the young through government ‘education.’ As the wealth of democratic countries grows, government schools are universally inflicted on children in order to control the thoughts and souls of their future livestock. All children bond with their educators. As women became liberated from the constraints of housework due to developments in, and the availability of, labor saving devices, government-paid intellectuals encouraged them to enter the taxable marketplace. With both parents working outside the home, governments can then take over the early education and indoctrination of children. Within less than a generation, taxes have increased to the point where two parents working take home less money than one parent working in the past.
Phase Two: Division
The second phase of livestock control is to pit citizens against each other through the creation of dependence while appearing to foster independence. It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force - and where it can be achieved, it remains cripplingly underproductive, as can be seen in North Korea. Human beings do not breed well or produce efficiently in direct captivity.
If human beings believe that they are free, however, they will produce much more for their farmers. The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll of the governing farmer. Those who become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack anyone who points out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership.
Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom?
If farmers can get the livestock to attack each other whenever one of them brings up the reality of their situation, they don’t have to spend nearly as much effort controlling them directly.
Those who become dependent upon the stolen largess of the farmer will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership—and the intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent upon the state—will say, to anyone who demands freedom from ownership: ‘You will harm the herd.’
The livestock are kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness of the system to those who demand real freedoms.
Phase Three: Fear
The third phase of livestock management is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock cling to the ‘protection’ of the farmers.
The Future?
This system of human farming is now nearing its end.
The terrible tragedy of the present system has occurred not in spite of, but because of past economic freedoms. The massive increases in wealth throughout the 19th century resulted from economic freedoms - and it is this very increase in wealth that has fed the size and power of the state.
When the livestock become exponentially more productive, there is a corresponding increase in the number of farmers and their dependents. The growth of the state is always proportional to the preceding economic freedoms. Freedom creates wealth, and the wealth attracts thieves and political parasites, whose greed then destroys the economic freedoms.
In other words, freedom metastasizes the cancer of the state.
The government that starts off the smallest will always end up the largest. This is why there can be no viable and sustainable alternative to a truly free and peaceful society. A society without political rulers, without human ownership, without the violence of taxation and statism.
To be truly free is both very easy, and very hard. We avoid the horror of our enslavement because it is painful to see it directly. We dance around the violence of our dying system because we fear the attacks of our fellow livestock. But we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see.
Wake up! To see the farm is to leave it."
Stefan Molyneux
