 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. We're doing something a little different on today's episode of Free Thoughts. Here at Cato, several of us have a book club that gets together every couple of weeks to discuss classic works of libertarian theory. And today we're going to talk about one of the essays that we read for that book club. To do this, we're welcoming back our colleague Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow at Cato, an editor of Cato Unbound. Today we're going to be talking about Auburn Herbert's essay, The Ethics of Dynamite. Herbert was a British writer who lived from 1838 to 1906. He was also a member of the House of Commons for four years in the 1870s. Today he's known mainly as a libertarian activist and proponent of volunteerism, which is the idea that the only legitimate form of the state is one that sticks to protecting our rights but is also funded through purely voluntary means. So it can't tax us, it only gets the money that people are willing to hand it. And so this particular essay of Herbert's was published in 1894. This is called The Ethics of Dynamite and it discusses a phenomenon that was very much in the news at the time known as anarchism. And this is a bit of a confusing term because today we might think of anarchism as mostly a philosophical position, position that government is morally illegitimate. Well, at least libertarians would think of it that way. A lot of people would just say anarchism to say want to destroy stuff. Or that there ought to be no government or we might say there's a state of anarchy in which there is no government. But what anarchism was used to mean back then was something a lot closer to what we today would call terrorism. Anarchists were people who bombed public buildings, who aimed to cause terror or suffering in public in a way that would they hope to bring people around to their philosophical or political position, which very frequently was some form of collectivism or some form of socialism. And they did, going into the 20s too, particularly they bombed Wall Street in a very, they bombed the LA Times, the Soco and Vincetti case where it tied up the Palmer raids. They definitely self-proclaimed anarchists or accused anarchists did do a lot of destruction up into the 1930s almost. Well, and they still do today in some forms in their WTO protest. Now, what this is, is obviously it's a thing that respectable people can't favor. No one is going to say, hey, let's bomb stuff to prove a point. The question then is, well, why is it worth talking about? Why are we here talking about the ethics of dynamite? And Oberon Herbert says, I detest dynamite because it is most treacherous, cruel, and altogether abominable. And he adds, I also detest it for other special reasons, and these other special reasons are really the core of the essay. This is why he finds it actually worth talking about as opposed to just being random violence. He adds that dynamite is what he calls a 19th century development in the art of governing. And thus, it's not really anarchistic after all. It's not about anarchy, it's about force. Which is also what government is. Which is also what government is. Which is ultimately the takeaway from this essay, we'll give spoilers right up front. Well, he gives them up pretty quickly. There's a lot of similarities between the way that states operate and the kinds of things that states do and the way that they get us to obey them and what the dynamite is out there doing. Well, here's Herbert's words. Dynamite is not opposed to government. It is, on the contrary, government in its most intensified and concentrated form. Whatever are the sins of everyday governmentalism, however brutal in their working, some of the great force machines with which we love to administer each other may tend to be, however reckless we may be as regards to each other's rights and our effort to place the yoke of our own opinions upon the neck of others, dynamite administers with quotes with a far ruder, rougher hand than ever the worst of the continental bureaucracies. So it's pretty clear that he views dynamite as a type of governing, which would probably offend many people today. It certainly would and the obvious sort of non-libertarian objection to this is that governments are morally legitimate and that when they do use force, that force is justified in some way and he goes on to attack certain of those justifications by no means all of them because logically you can't knock down every single possible justification, but he does say, look, if you are going to resort to force, you have to answer the problem of natural right. That is that when you coerce someone, you do in fact attack their rights. You impose yourself over their rights and doing that by say majority vote does not work for him. He finds that not to be a sufficient justification. How is it that a natural right can be defeated in essence by math? He asks that he says, is it possible to suppose without absurdity that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind and yet have a 110 millionth share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds? If he does not begin by possessing rights over himself, by what wonderful flying leap can he arrive at rights over others? That is to say, if you're a citizen in a democratic polity, you are going to have political rights over others. If you can form a majority coalition in that polity, then yes, you may say procedurally, I have the power to do this. Herbert's objection to that is, well, morally, you still have a problem. You have not defeated rights just by force of greater number. Yeah, and I find that I liked that he brought that up because it's an argument that I've made often that there's an inconsistency in the suppositions that undergird majorities because you do majorities by counting people. You don't measure everyone's height and see the tallest group of people get to rule over the other people because it is the unit of the person that matters in choosing and creating a majority. If it is the unit of the person that justifies a majority, how can or when can and how can possibly a majority override the very thing that it justifies its existence if it has power at all? Yeah, this seems, I mean, for a lot of people, it's kind of counterintuitive because there's this sense that majorities, if we're deciding what we're going to, a group of friends are going to decide what to do for dinner, we vote and you kind of, if you're the guy who wanted Italian and everyone else wants Chinese, you go along with the Chinese. You don't hold out and insist, well, I'm going to go off to have Italian on my own or whatever. You could. We'd look, we'd be like, that's a little bit odd. That's a little bit odd, but if I were deathly allergic to seafood and the majority wanted to go out to a seafood restaurant, I might say, well, wait a minute, I'm not going to follow you. Right, but I guess it's just for, I mean, quite a lot of people, there isn't something immediately, obviously morally wrong about majority rule. Oh, I think, yeah. And there's also the idea that if we have to make decisions somehow, then that's probably the most legitimate way as opposed to measuring height or something else. And there are certainly great advantages to democracy. I don't mean to say that this critique of democracy means we should have no democracy whatsoever. I do think that democracy is great for doing things like selecting individuals to hold public office or settling questions that otherwise are very difficult to resolve in like manner. But when it comes to, say, disposing of an individual's property, then it begins to look less like democracy and more like mob rule. When it begins to interfere with individual autonomy and individual lives, then it's got a problem. Right, so when we're overriding rights with it, because then that's where we get back to it looks like the dynamiter in that the dynamiter is simply substituting his desires in a extremely violent way for those of the people he blows up or the property owners of shops he destroys or whatever. And the political majorities are doing something quite similar, especially if they're overriding rights. They're taking whatever their preferences or whatever their interests are and just saying, mind Trump, but they're giving, I mean, unlike the dynamiter who is very direct, both in his methods. No trappings of power, no horns, no inauguration ceremonies. I get what I want and I'm going to blow you up to get it. The majorities in the state have these kind of elaborate stories to tell about how this same application of force is made better by this math that he questions. Now if I could just dissent a tiny bit from Oberon Herbert here, I might say that the trappings of power and the elaborate stories and the rituals and the regularity of democratic governance are actually really important because they do tend to prevent the state from acting like dynamiters in the worst sense of that. The state's violence does get limited by all of those things. Even if you have an absolute monarchy, if you have traditions that limit that absolute monarchy, those can be very powerful and they can in time lead to significant reforms of the state and that's exactly what had happened in England. So there are very important considerations here that do somewhat incline me a bit more toward the state as opposed to the dynamiters and when he looks at the two of them and says you are equivalent, I see what he's saying, but at the same time if I had to pick between them, I'm going to pick the state, I think. So I think that's a good point, which I think brings an important point up for libertarians in general, which I would also say for modern political philosophy, people who care about legitimacy of the state as all modern political philosophy is supposed to care about. But when you have these trappings of power, when you have courtly robes and judges who sit four feet above everyone else and all these different things, which I do think are important and intellectual people will sort of poo-poo this, they've been doing it for a long time, like pay no attention to the man behind the curtain type of stuff. It's just a king in a robe with a lot of jewels. He's still just a man. He's still just a fallible person. But if you're talking about ruling most people and you have a theory of human nature that says that most people are below average, or at least half of them are below average, and most people maybe desire to be ruled in some way, or most people are not equipped in the way that sort of skeptics and intellectuals are to see through the trappings of power. So give the people what they want. Give them some sort of ceremony rather than bombs. And in the end of the day, it's just a function of human nature that you have to give them ceremony rather than bombs, but at least you're not giving them bombs. At least you're giving them trumpet music and courtly processions and all this other inauguration parades and all those other stuff. That's true to a point, but also what I mean is that when you have regular forms that the government must take when it is established that we always have elections, when it is established that laws are always registered by the courts, when it is established that term limits are always respected. These are limits on government power. These are limits on the individuals who occupy the offices, and those are meaningful. Now, the rituals of government, of course, can be used in an abusive way and they can be used to invest certain people with an error of majesty that presumably they don't deserve, and then from that people may show more deference to their authority, and that's a problem. That's not really what I was trying to get out there. Well, I also want to say that there's a difference between what works and what works on people and what those people want, and we need to be careful to distinguish that because it may be, you can say people are drawn towards the pageantry of the state. They're drawn towards the kind of architecture of power in the terms of the judges sit up here and we have all the marble in D.C. and it's very grand, and concluding that therefore that's what people want, or instead saying that those things play into psychological characteristics of human beings and are being consciously used by people who want to gain and maintain power without people actually wanting to be ruled in this particular way. Yeah, I think that's just, this is a way that happens to get people to put up with it more. I'm not, of course, necessarily making a claim that we should dress up power in all the accoutrements of French kings pre-revolution, but I do think as someone who works on the Supreme Court, for example, which I think has a different sort of type of legitimacy behind it, especially because it's more intellectually rigorous, it has to actually write things that explain why it's doing it. If the Supreme Court held sessions in a shack at a fold-up table with plastic chairs, I think that it would change how the perception of the court in terms of something that actually hands down things that are worth listening to. I guess I can't immediately decide if that's good or bad. Well, neither can I. It's just an interesting thing I've thought about before when you sit in the court and see them do this as a libertarian, but still feeling somewhat like, wow, this is an awesome display of power type of thing. I'm sure even if say 50% of people are below average, which is definitional, it doesn't necessarily follow that what they need is an absolute ruler over them. I think that Oberon Herbert deals with this very, very well when he talks about some of the other arguments that are used to justify the power of majorities. He says it's sometimes urged in indefensive power that the part which falls to discontented minorities is to turn themselves into majorities. If you're unhappy with the majority, what you need to do is, if you can't beat them, join them basically, figure out how to make your own majority that will overcome the current majority and then you wield the power and then you get to do what you want to do. He says this remedy has the slight defect of drawing upon an imagined future and ignoring a real present. And when you say, well, one day you'll be in the majority, that's that can be pretty cold comfort to groups that have almost always been minorities. In the history of Europe, if you look at Jews or Gypsies or gays or lesbians, there will be minorities no matter what and saying, hey, you just need to join the majority. That's cold comfort. It seems like it's the wrong answer, too. I mean, even if we set aside the issue of how realistic it is that these majorities who are being beat up on right now or these minorities are being beat up on right now could eventually become majorities, the notion that if you're being beat up on, the way to solve it is to get the power to start beating people up. When in fact, it seems obvious that the way to solve it is to simply have people stop beating each other up. Yes. Beating up is the problem. It's not the solution. It's not the end state here. It's the thing that we're trying to get rid of. Yeah, the line that he uses, and you might have been just about to read this, Jason, when he says the cold comfort of that you might be in the majority of the future, says, it can hardly unhang a man or wipe out of existence the weakest weeks he has spent in prison or give back property that has been taken from him and spent or build up some great voluntary institution which has been destroyed or invent redress for restrictions placed upon facilities of an individual during the best years of his life or remove the twist it has given to the national character by unwise and harsh measures. A very interesting passage about the kind of injustices that we talk a lot about here, whether it's drug war imprisonment or being locked in a public school, failing public school, which of course affects your entire life and how much you can do with your life. It can hardly be like, well, it's time for you to get into the majority and figure out how to fix schools as opposed to something that we say stop doing this stuff to people. Yeah. I mean, Herbert Dressie brings up exactly this idea of kind of the oddity of saying violence is the proper solution to violence. He says he asks us to imagine I'm walking along a road and some stranger then knocks me down and begins to cudgel me about the head. I call to a passerby to help me and to drag the villain off. He stands, however, with his hands in his pocket and cheerfully tells me that it is all right that I ought not to object. If I only practice the use of the cudgel myself with sufficient zeal for a month or perhaps a year, I shall then be in a position to cudgel my assailant quite as effectively about the head as he is now cuddling me. I reply they don't believe in cuddling heads, whether it is my head or the head of somebody else. The passerby, however, merely shrugs his shoulders by way of telling me that it is idle to object to what is so excellent a custom and one which is universally practiced in the district. This is exactly the like if the government is forced and the problem is we're forcing each other to do things that those people don't want then what you got to do is just start forcing your will upon others. Yeah, but I mean it's interesting, we like those examples and I think it's a great passage. It's interesting to me that so many people don't like those examples. They think that they're ridiculous analogies, right? Yeah, right, but it's easy to see the appeal of it for someone who has perhaps all their life been a part of a majority. When you live your life in a majority, you will think differently and Herbert goes on to talk about that. He says that there's what he calls the national life or national unity argument. This is where if you take part in the life of the nation through the state, which is its agent, you will stand again something spiritually and there's something very useful or even wholly almost about participating in national life and being a part of a thing that is larger than yourself and nationalists to this day talk about that as being a great thing and he has a very interesting and challenging argument against that and then that is to invoke Herbert Spencer and through him also, I think Adam Smith in saying that progress is difference and what that means in economics is that you have specialization and gains through trade and so when an economy progresses, suddenly there is not just a doctor anymore. There is a doctor who is a cardiologist and specializes just in one organ of the body and its diseases and its cures and that's progress because there has been more knowledge added and there's now capability that society didn't have before for people to make progress on not just health in a general sense, but on all the different capabilities and diseases in particular and with lots more people working on them and that means that there's going to be lots more diversity in society, not just in the quota or token sense or filling in this check box and the census form, but there's going to be diversity in what people are up to, what they're doing and that ought to be something that on the one hand is great in economic terms and great in material culture terms but also great, he says, in terms of the life of the nation. The nation is not going to be great when everyone is the same, it's going to be great when everyone is up to a lot of very different things and then they collaborate or they coordinate through voluntary and free means. So we don't want people using, we don't want majorities using the force of the state or extreme minorities using the force of dynamite to force their preferred version of sameness upon everyone and thereby cutting off this progress, but I want to, I wonder if the cudgel example and this violence example that he gives is the best way or even really gets to the heart of this problem, so let me, I'm looping back around to the cudgel because so we don't, it's wrong to, his thing is it's wrong to beat people over the head with the cudgel and it's wrong to say the solution to being beat over the head is to just build up cudgel skill and beat over the head with the other guy, but what is the solution then? Because someone's got to stop the cuddling, right? You can't, if you're not going to do it, then that guy's just going to sit there and keep beating you. So first this cudgel is not the same thing as limiting the economy or whatever which, you know, or the kinds of things that aren't as explicitly like individual rights. I mean, restricting people's economic liberties is a rights violation, but it's a different kind of rights violation, say, than beating someone over the head with a cudgel. And so that's, it seems almost as if the cudgel example is precisely the area where counter cuddling is necessary and ought to be done by the state, which then who is that? Well, maybe it could be done by the state or maybe it could be done by culture. I mean, I always think of the great Oscar Wilde quote where he says something like, we will not succeed in outlying war by convincing people that it is wicked. We will succeed in outlawing war by convincing them that it is vulgar. And in a way that is a lot of what we're after here. Convincing people that resorting to the political means, resorting to force to get what you want out of society is actually the less sophisticated, the less intelligent way to do it. It's vulgar. It's ugly. I think that's a really good point. As I said, the cigarettes is a good example of that. Someone the other day mentioned to me that isn't smoking cigarettes something that poor people do, which as I've mentioned to you, incredibly classist as an incredibly classist type of thing, it's interesting that that's now where it's gone. It's now a vulgarity. It's not so much wicked. It's just a vulgarity. But I think that way I can connect what Aaron said about cuddling in terms of what do you do when you get cuddled? Because I think that's the proper question to what Jason said about national unity and diversity. Because what we're talking about here, if we think about Hobbes and Locke and state of nature arguments that justify the state, where the problem is that you can't combat cuddling or you might not be able to combat cuddling. The other question someone might say to us, someone who is attacking libertarianism, might say, well, your solution to cuddling is for someone to go to the gym and lift weights and become stronger in a world of only the strong and the finished self-survive. Or hire a guy who's strong. And so then the people who get cuddled will be the ones who are A, either stronger or B, have enough money to hire someone who's stronger. And that's what one thing we would say. But of course, we believe in protecting Heraketa, protecting life, liberty and property of which, of course, cuddling is one of them. And you talk about national unity, Jason, when you talked about... Wait, wait, cuddling is a form of... Cuddling is a violation of... Violation. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. And Jason, you brought up the national unity argument for diversity and that progress is different. Yeah. I hope the nation is a nation full of people who are all weird in their particular way. And that means they get good at different things. They have a lot of things to offer one another. No, voluntarily. Not the cuddling party, yes. Voluntarily. Because people develop in the arts or in literature or in business or in science. And all of these things are then resources they can offer to each other in the market. Yeah. And I think that he says this on his actual line, Herbert writes, Oberon Herbert writes, it was, however, a truth taught by Mr. Herbert Spencer that most effectively withered the rhetorical foliage of this particular argument when he wrote progress as difference. He wrote the doom of many pretentious state undertakings, whether systems of, and these are important ones, religion, education, trade, poor relief, insurance or any other member of the same unprosperous family. Now, those are all very high level types of state activity, right? It's not anti-cuddling work. It's not, it's not basic police work. It's, it's more of the stuff that I've talked about is the primitive primitivism of politics or John Rawls talks about as, as overlapping consensus or minimally normative type of things, all the things that we can all agree on that maybe the state should do, like stop people from stop people from cuddling. Yeah. And it's also, it's also writing in advance the doom of communism because communism undertook exactly that sort of economic planning that sort of making things uniform, the mass projects where you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working on a project like we're going to build a canal or we're going to build a railroad across Siberia and, and it doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't matter what plans you might have had for your life. You're going to do this now and, and you know, squashing everyone into a given mold and, and these things in time came to seem less and less inspiring and more and more like a joke to the people of the Soviet Union. And that's, that's why it collapsed. Well, that's a, that's a great segue because one of the questions I had about the way the whole theme of this essay that governing begets dynamiders or dynamiting begets dynamiders or violence begets violence. Unjustified use of force begets unjustified use of force. In communist nations, we did see this interesting thing, I think in a more pronounced and known way, whereas the character of the government really did affect the character of the people, right? In the, in the sense that, so Herbert makes his argument that the dynamiders learn from the governing class who, who have these bad explanations for why they deserve power. They learn how to, how to use power with bad explanations too. But similarly, in communist countries, people were constantly, you know, they didn't, these officials, the corrupt officials who they distrusted, the corrupt officials who eroded the social communities that they had grown up. They adopted all those same behaviors they did to try and stab each other in the back. And it was, it was all a big question of who could stab each other in the back the quickest. And they, you could say they learned it from the government or the governing class in the most basic sense. And Herbert addresses that, that particular issue of the state as kind of the, the moral exemplar or perceived moral exemplar. And what that does when the state is trying to enforce, he calls that argument that the state should be the one to set moral standards and teach us to be moral and whatnot. He calls that people who advocate that state morality people. And he says that in their view, the state was the father, mother and goodness knows what, controlling with its superior wisdom, the rash impulses of the children. He, it was replied that the state was not father or mother. So replied by the people arguing against this idea of state morality. It was replied that the state was not father or mother. But it was only one rash set of the children and perhaps not the best, controlling for their own purposes, another set of the children, that there was nothing very moral and controlling other people. The worst rulers had always been glad to perform that office for others. That what was moral was self control and that there was no possibility of the compelled man becoming a moral man, for he was reduced to the position of a person with his hands tied from whom had been taken the power of choosing the good thing for its own sake. What we see now is exactly this process, I think, in the Middle East where if you read what the leaders of Al Qaeda have written, they will say the governments here are illegitimate. We are at war with them. They are the dynamiters of today and yes, they are reprehensible and yes, they do horrible things. And yet, I can at least somewhat understand that it is a response to many of the very autocratic regimes that have existed for so long in the Middle East and that sadly we've done a lot to support. Yeah. And the same thing going back to what I said about the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, Pete Bedke has written a lot about how much the degradation of the moral character of people comes to play, especially if you have this view of the state morality people. I mean, I often would like people to have less of a view that the state is an exemplar of morality and take more of that responsibility for themselves. When someone tells me that the state legalizing drugs is a way of endorsing drugs, I would like people to stop thinking that way as opposed to be like, no, it's the state saying that this is not our province. This is not what we are supposed to be doing. It doesn't mean that they're saying that you should go out there and smoke marijuana. If endorsing drugs is what we do by legalizing drugs, then does the state endorse Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam all at once? Yeah. Alcohol, yeah. I don't think that it's possible. I mean, that's logically absurd. You can't subscribe to all of those religions or endorse all of those religions at once. And the same is true with drug use. It's not an endorsement. It's just we're going to stop putting you in a box if you do this. Right. I think people tend to think that there's a difference between those kinds of things because people would say like, most people would admit, yeah, there are lots of all sorts of immoral things that one could do that are not illegal and should not be illegal. So it's wrong to repeatedly not show up to your kid's concert at school because you want to go to a meeting or break promises like that sort of stuff. But we wouldn't but most people even even people who are strongly in favor of drug prohibition wouldn't say, well, we should also prohibit that sort of behavior with the state. But there's something different about I guess that makes it makes it more of a moral wrong or makes it so that allowing that particular thing is seen as endorsement in a way that and it could it be, I mean, could it be to some extent them, you know, because the views against marijuana prohibition, you know, increasing numbers of people see marijuana use as fine or not any worse than alcohol use or not something the state. And so there is this kind of rising tide of endorsement or at least not moral shaming of this behavior. And then that's being reflected in a changing policy. And so people are, you know, they're getting kind of cause and effect mixed up, you know. And so they're then thinking that if they can if they can stop the effect, stop the legalization of marijuana, they can turn back the cause, which is, you know, the changing moral attitudes towards it. So they're making a mistake, but at least they're that there is a relationship that they're hooking on to. So in that mind mindset about, you know, how do people view the state? Are they viewing it as a teacher? Are they do they even care about the justifications of the state? That's one that I think is important. One of the things that I think about when I when I read this essay and other things like this is whether or not a this resonates at all with people nowadays or maybe it resonated more than but nowadays does it resonate with people at all? Does this seem like extremist literature? Is this any good method for rhetorically going about talking about the ideas of liberty to come in here and give them an ethics of dynamite and have people maybe think that you're justifying, you know, blowing up stuff because you think that's what government does? Is this our best messaging or should we would this be the first thing you gave someone who was interested in libertarianism? It wouldn't be the first thing I would give them. But I think that it's certainly an exemplary piece of libertarian writing. I think that virtually everything that over on Herbert says about the dynamiters, libertarians should feel proud about saying of terrorists today, yes, they are evil, they are destructive, this is violence, it is deplorable, it is against everything that I stand for and yet where did that come from? Where did that come from? It came from a long experience of despotic arbitrary government and grievances that could not possibly be addressed under that system. He talks about how the dynamiter is forged on the official anvil that what makes people into dynamiters is in fact the violence of the state and the experience of the violence. He says, vexation piled upon vexation, restriction upon restriction, burden upon burden, the dynamiter is slowly hammered out everywhere on the official anvil. And if I wanted to say how did terrorism come to be? Well, I would say this. I would say exactly this, that when there are not institutions to peaceably resolve disputes when government is arbitrary, when it is acting to censor the press and to establish particular forms of religion and to say that others are deviant, yes, you're going to see terrorism. You will see terrorism. This is cause and effect as close as it ever happens in the world of politics. This is cause and effect. So it's a blowback argument. Well, in a kind of, you know, a different version. Which is not to endorse terrorism. I think that I would stress that in the very opening of the essay, Oberon Herbert says that he abhors the means of the dynamiters and then move on from that. You know, that's the easy call. It's very, very easy to say, yes, these people are repellent and I reject them entirely. Now let's move on from that. But it seems like, I mean, the obvious objection here to that idea is that the world has terrorists in it, whether there's a state or not, and that there are people out there who want to hurt other people. Does it? Whether there's a state or not, and that if you want to protect yourself from people who want to hurt, take you over, whether it was trying to give a good step, the Roman empire or something like that, there are people coming in who want to use force to make you behave and the state is a very important institution for keeping us protected from those people. Well, I think that the world might have thieves and might have murderers without the state, but I don't think it would have terrorists. In that sense, really? I really don't think so because terrorism, I think, is a political crime. I think that is aimed at taking control of the political means. This is, as he makes the dynamiters say, as Oberon Herbert makes the dynamiter say, this is the power of the minority, resort to dynamite is the power of the minority, government is the power of the majority, I'm going to use my power, which is to inflict pain. But I think when most people talk about, when most people are scared of terrorism and use that term and we need to do something about it, I want to say there's a different, maybe definition at work there of terrorism and I think it's one that Trevor's point about it still existing in the absence of a state works more with because you're saying terrorism is these attempts to use violence to influence the political process. But I think what that's, it's people aren't scared, people who are terrified of terrorist attacks aren't scared that someone's going to influence the political process. They're scared of being hurt. They're scared of being hurt. I mean, if there's the, the scared of the influence in the political process of the people who want to reform campaign finance and all of that. So for them terrorism is more something roughly like indiscriminate killing in large numbers and that you could have all sorts of motivations for doing that. You could be doing it for extortion. You could be doing it simply because you are crazy and evil and like it and those sorts of terrorism defined that way would probably exists, you know, no matter what the political structure. Okay. Okay. You can define terrorism that way if you like, but I think it loses a lot of its analytical power. If you do that, I think, I think that means you're lumping in things that are, are massively different. So Adam Lamza is a different kind of evil from Osama bin Laden. But I think Trevor's point is that we can say, people might say, look, that sort of terrorism, this, this like indiscriminate large scale killing is going to exist, you know, whether there's a state or not. And so the state, you know, may potentially make it worse along, in some degree, but not having the state is going to mean no protection from it is going to mean make it even worse than it would be with the state there influencing a little bit. And so we're willing to put up with this, the dynamite in the form of fancy robes and columns and marble in order to prevent other types of violence that aren't the ones that are beget by the state, but are the ones that are part of the natural human condition. Right. I mean, that's just, that's just the social contract. That's John Locke, very basic stuff. Yeah. And there's, that is still a very compelling argument. It's not the case that all majorities are the same. They're ruling over other types of minorities. That's why things like the non-aggression principle right or wrong as a, as a, you know, the lowest defense of libertarian principles, for example, but you still need something that says this is, this is not okay. And this is okay. Like there's, it's not like we're trying to protect the minority of child murderers because it's the, it's the, it's the type of immorality that they're practicing that is not acceptable. And regardless of whether or not they form a political group or anything like that, that is not an acceptable type of morality. So that's why we have a minimal level where we say we need to enforce the basic protections and have something to do that. Let me go back to Trevor's question about how good this argument is for convincing non-libertarians and modify it a bit because it seems like this, this argument that Herbert's making about the government being a, a form of force that's different in some ways, but not really all that different from the dynamiter is, is similar to a broader kind of argument that libertarians make all the time. So for this book club that we read this in a little while back, we read Oppenheimer's The State, which is a story about how the state emerges from basically bandits who want to steal stuff. Yes. They, they, you know, they can go on raids, but eventually they realize that it's easier and it's more productive to just settle down and rule a group of people and extract money from them in taxation than it is to steal their stuff, burn their houses, and then come back later and do it again. And so in that case it's the, you know, he's telling a story of the government as thieves and Herbert is telling a story of the government as effectively murderers or at least people engaging in physical assault. And so this, this story of the government as actually a, I guess a criminal act or a criminal organization is one that libertarians, you know, Ray Rothbard wrote an essay called The Anatomy of the State, which makes these same sorts of claims. This is a pretty common libertarian argument and, and is that one that works for people who are not already libertarians? Well, it's not going to work all by itself, but if you do present this and then say we also have another model, a legitimate government would not be a group of stationary bandits. It would not be a group of, of majoritarians with a cudgel. It would be a service provider, a, a provider of a service that you want for which you will be willing to pay taxes or for which you will be willing to make voluntary contributions. This is precisely the volunteerism that Herbert This is Herbert's volunteerism, which we haven't had enough time to get into, but a, a voluntarily financed government that was very strictly limited in its powers as an alternative to a majority that can do whatever that, whatever it feels like. That's, I think, a much better alternative. When you, when you give people no alternatives between the state and the dynamiders, of course they're going to choose the state, but what we need to do is give them a third choice. Yeah, that's a good point. I think that you can't make these arguments by themselves. All, all these sort of vectors of both the possibilities, the free market and the effectiveness of various things versus the dangers of the state and the ineffectiveness of, they have to be brought together. But I do think that it is important for us, these kind of essays bring back the question of why is their state anyway? And, and anyone who's at all dealt with political philosophy shouldn't take that as an obvious question. Unfortunately, we do. Release a question with an obvious answer. An obvious, yeah, because, and that's, I think it's a danger of modern political discourse. I think that Enlightenment era philosophers said, well, the state is kind of loosely justified to do a few things, but it needs justification because it is force and therefore, and force like that needs justification. We don't talk about that anymore. And in fact, we looked at as crazy people if we bring it up. We're just like, well, why is the state justified? And people will look at us, you know, people who aren't libertarian and who's like, we're extremists when actually we are explaining a mainstream, the main current of political philosophy since Thomas Hobbes. And I'll just pop in to note that a few episodes back, we did a podcast with Jason Brennan on the legitimacy of the state and these questions. So if you're curious about this complex question of justification for the state, I encourage you to listen to that episode. Yeah, it comes up. It comes up a lot in our discussions here, but I mean, I think it's a point that's worth making time and time again. There is an intuitive, the state is not intuitive, I think, in the way. And if you bring things like this up, if people have never heard this before, I think most people would say, well, that's an interesting point. And they might think about it more and then at least return the question to why is this thing existing? What is it supposed to do? Is it authorized to do anything? I mean, once it gets authorized, once it gets off the ground, is it anything goes after this NSA spying to drug prohibition to all these things? Or can we formulate an idea that says that there's a problem with NSA spying? There's a problem with marijuana prohibition. There's a problem with certain types of laws that is based on the fact that the state is at best loosely justified. And that's where I think these arguments come in valuable. But it shouldn't be the first thing you give it, because people are so awash with this that they don't really think about the state that way. So I did have one extra little thing I wanted to close with. In the latter part of the essay, Herbert comes in with a lot of sort of examples of kind of how poor the state is at doing some things. And this is where I thought you have these 100-year-old essay, 120-year-old essay that is still talking about problems today. And some of them that particularly struck me were the, he talks about how in Paris, there's a, he quotes a law professor talking about holding the state accountable and France these actions to which a government as a party are tried in special administrative courts and by special administrative rules that these courts have a strong official bias and actions laid by private individuals against state officials rarely succeed. This is something I thought was amazing in terms of cops being exonerated recently for killing people in cold blood on the street because cops hardly ever get accused any of those crimes. There's a lot of interesting things that he brings up. There's another one about the inefficiency of the courts, which is something that I think is the libertarians think about in terms of how much the state providing courts, but maybe it does it poorly in a way that we should reassess, said in Paris, he says there's but one police court for the 20 counties of sections of Paris, about 200 cases are taken at each sitting, which lasts from an hour to a half to three hours. This only gives about one minute per each case. And if anyone's ever been to county court or knows a public defender, that's about as much time as you get to defend yourself against the state. He's really hitting on a bunch of really interesting problems here. And it's also goes well beyond the courts. I mean, there's a lot of other what he calls petty tyrannies that the state imposes. He says an unfortunate seaside resident may not go out and dip his bucket into great father ocean and carry off water for his bath. Such liberty might interfere with the revenue derived from salt. Salt was a commonly taxed commodity and doing a completely harmless action like taking a bucket of seawater out of the ocean, which is obviously renewable at that scale infinitely. That was prohibited. Or he says the petty tyranny which forbids a child being called by a new name, which we still to this day encounter in a lot of countries. Countries in Europe will forbid children from having unusual names. Oh, that's true. Yeah. They're nameless. I know Denmark has one. I think Germany has one. Yes. That is like prohibited official. You have to get approved by the government, which is astounding to us. Those are the petty tyrannies which I think affect some of the sociology of the state and maybe how many we're willing to accept in the first place. And well, I might not necessarily say it's a wise idea to name your child a numeral or a punctuation mark. At the same time, I really doubt that this is something that the state needs to be involved in. We've run out of time, but I think we've managed to cover a good deal of what's in this essay. Let's close the same way that Herbert does with his terrific last bit here. He writes, We may be quite sure that force users will be force begetters. The passions of men will rise higher and higher and the authorized and unauthorized governments. The government of the majority and of written laws, the government of the minority and of dynamite will enter upon their desperate struggle, of which no living man can read the end. In one way and only one way can the dynamiter be permanently disarmed by abandoning in almost all directions our force machinery and accustomizing the people to believe in the blessed weapons of reason, persuasion and voluntary service. We have morally made the dynamiter. We must now morally unmake him. I want to thank Jason for joining us today and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this more book club style episode of free thoughts and I hope you'll let us know what you thought of it. And if you have suggestions for texts we should read and discuss, books or essays, please send them our way. You can find me on Twitter at A Ross P, that's A R O S S P. And you can find me on Twitter at TC Burris, TC B U R R U S. You can find me at Twitter at J A S O N K U Z N I C K I.