This week’s episode marks the longest recording we’ve released to date in our reasonably short catalog. We tried trimming it down it bit, but there was just too much juicy discussion to ignore. Hopefully everyone gets their money’s worth.

Our topic for the week centers around the idea of forcing morality onto others within a society. We explore various hypothetical ideas such as how a government might form from an isolated group of people, how roles of leadership would surface, and what the driving forces would be behind the desire for collective participation. We also spend some time pondering whether or not a practical solution is necessary to every problem we encounter. Slavery for example: were 750,000 lives really necessary to address this problem, or were there other ways?

Material from Podcast

Music

• Starving Streets by Plain Jane Automobile

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Transcript of Podcast

Kevin: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the JK Podcast, a quaint little place on the internet where we explore the grand ideas of liberty, humanity, and equality amongst other parts of the human experience. This week’s episode marks the longest recording we’ve released to date in our reasonably short catalog. We tried trimming it down a bit, but there was just too much juicy discussion to ignore. Hopefully, everyone gets their money’s worth.

Our topic for the week centers around the idea of forcing morality onto others within a society. We explore various hypothetical ideas such as how a government might form from an isolated group of people, how roles of leadership would surface, and what the driving forces would be behind the desire for the collective participation in the group.

We also spend some time pondering whether or not a practical solution is necessary to every problem we encounter. Slavery for example, were 750,000 really necessary to address this problem, or were there other ways? There’s quite a handful to take in and we certainly hope you enjoy every moment. I’m Kevin Ludlow. The other voice you’ll hear is Jad Davis. Welcome back to the show.

Jad: There’s a show that – it kind of drives me nuts actually, but it’s not our dynamic at all – which is good – but it’s a good show. It’s called Free Talk Live, and it’s kind of crazy. It’s on you know, 500 radio stations Nationwide –

Kevin: Okay.

Jad: But the guy who runs the show is an anarchist, you know, like a real anarchist – like a non-violent – just anti-authoritarian.

Kevin: Right.

Jad: He is sort of the show engineer – the techie guy – he runs it out of his own house –

Kevin: Okay.

Jad: – and then they just kind of built up syndication over the years. The other guy he does the show with though is this kind of wheedling statist guy. He just always believes that there’s some you know – this is also your position, but I’m not trying –

Kevin: No, no, no.

Jad: – to play the two of you, but anyway, so they get in these long, huge fights like about every 10 or 20 episodes or so, and they actually get genuinely mad at each other you know, and he’ll be like, “fine, Mark, that’s fine. Next point, next caller”, or whatever, you know? It’s amusing anyway, and that’s kind of our initials – for starting spots anyway.

Kevin: I guess that’s kind of true I mean, I guess the semblance that we have is that I’m certainly very opposed to the government – I guess I’m of the mindset that – well, kind of going back to my all people are evil sort of thing, is that you’re always going to have people who are seeking power, and as a result of that you’re always going to have some sort of governing structure that’s in place. You don’t have to call it a government, but there’s always going to be somebody holding the gun because I think all people are evil.

So if you had a society of 10 people, one of them is going to get stronger than the other ones and say – you know, he might even be a good guy – but he’s going to say, “hey, no, no, no – we’re going to do it this way”, and when they say, “I don’t really want to do it that way”, maybe he’s not going to shoot them, but he’s going to very cleverly coerce them into saying, “no, no, no – we’re going to do it this way”, and [?] you’ve got a government structure that unfolds[?]. So I guess my take is to say if I assume that that’s always going to be the basis then we’re going to have to work within the confines of that system somehow or another.

So even though I’d like to be against it, I’m hopeful that there’s ways to at least improve it. I actually tend to agree with you – you’re never going to fix it, you’re never going to make it good, and even though I guess I had never really expressed it before or perhaps even fully thought about it, I think your point on our 2^nd episode about you know, even if you were to have somebody like the Ron Paul, or the Gary Johnson[?], or Ralph Nader type person – a Dennis Kucinich – somebody who genuinely wants to only have the government do the good things.

Aren’t there going to be other people that want to rise up above, or isn’t that person perhaps even going to corrupt and start to seek additional power? How do you prevent that from happening in the long run? And I think the answer – now that I’ve thought about it for a few weeks is that you’re absolutely right, you’re never going to fix that.

Jad: Right.

Kevin: But it doesn’t change the fact that I think – in my mind anyways – we’re still going to ultimately live within those confines.

Jad: Right, right. Well I guess we’re never going to get to have a good fight then because I totally agree that this is like a classic though experiment is that if you could press a button – just like the previous episode – and make the government just vanish, then would you do it? The idea being you know, what about people who are waiting for their check tomorrow you know, so they can go get food – are you willing to cast them out at the same time, do you free everyone else, and what do you think would even happen?

Would there be like, just riots and the entire country burning as the anti-anarchist would always predict, that could actually be the case if you just instantly banish the government without having people prepared mentally to be free people, you know?

Kevin: Right, right.

Jad: And like you said, like, the classic example of like, a Roman Empire falling, right? All of a sudden there’s no central government, and there’s just 5,000 tiny, tiny little futile systems with little lords everywhere that have each managed to seize the gun – or the power –

Kevin: Right.

Jad: – in their little tiny space, and they spent the next thousand years trying expand their power and fighting with each other and whatnot.

Kevin: And here we are.

Jad: And here we are again, right?

Kevin: Right, right.

Jad: So I agree, I think that – I think there’s probably – there’s a whole spectrum of them obviously, but the anarchist argument that I think I would subscribe to is that you have to have each of those 10 people – as in your example of 10 people – and each of those 10 people has to understand that nobody has the right to drop a gun on them.

Kevin: Right.

Jad: And the minute somebody drops a gun on somebody else, everybody’s responsibility to stop that from happening, and it’s not really a problem if everyone understands that. The problem is when there’s 9 people, or 8 people that feel like they need to do what that one guy says because God appointed him as position, or because we all voted for him to be in charge, and then the one person says, “I don’t want to do that”, then the guy points the gun at him. You’ve got to understand at a fundamental moral level that threatening people who haven’t hurt you is evil, and if you don’t have that then who knows what will happen.

If you do have that though, then the bully is immediately stopped you know, at the point of his first attempt to use aggression against somebody else – and that’s what you have to have in order to have a free – a governmentless society because otherwise I totally agree with you. Some army guy is going to take his tanks and roll up to Washington, D. C. and be like, “now, continue to pay continue to pay your taxes”, you know, “we’re in charge of this thing now. Just because the other government banished doesn’t mean that you don’t have to pay.”

Kevin: Right, right. We’re still taking something. But I mean, on that note I mean, do you think though that in those groups, leadership is still required?

Jad: I think so. I think the only – it really is fairly simple – the only thing that’s not allowed – anything is allowed, persuasion, ostracism, I don’t have to talk to you, I don’t have to sit next to you, I don’t – you know, if you have offended me in some way, there’s no way that we have to interact with each other. The only thing I cannot do is force you to do what I want you to do.

Kevin: True.

Jad: I can pay you to do it, I can ask you to do it, I can do anything – I can beg you to do it, and that should be well understood. Anyone doing that with anyone else, nothing is – no one is being fundamentally violated, but the minute somebody threatens someone physically you know, and not in self defense, then that is the violation that can’t be tolerated.

Kevin: Right. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, it’s an interesting point of view because I was going to say you know – from a psychological point of view as I’ve gotten older – one of the things I really like doing is you know, planning events and – I don’t need to be a leader of things, but I also don’t mind being a leader of things. Oh, you weren’t at lunch with us the other day, but I was telling them about this big ski trip that I put together – I think it was 2 years ago. I had 38 people go on the trip, so that’s a lot of people to mobilize into the mountains and get them all set up, and in any case, the point though is to say that I’ve learned that people for the most part really do want to have somebody tell them what to do in many situations like that.

It’s just easier for people because if you let everybody to their own devices then obviously there’s all sorts of – just confusion and general chaos that ensues. Now I suppose the difference is that – and that’s why I asked about the leadership – at no point am I saying you know, “you have to do this, or else”, it’s just to say, “hey, this is what’s going on, I’d like you guys to follow.” But I guess you know, if I expand that into a – philosophically expand that into a much larger setup – let’s just say I take all these people on a ski trip and I’m the one who’s in charge of it, and so I’m taking care of everybody, so to speak, and kind of leading the way for say, a week. Well maybe the last day that we’re there, the world blows up and there’s little factions of people left.

At that point in time, it stands to reason that I don’t know, probably a lot of people would still look to me for direction since I’m the one who was already giving direction. Maybe that continues, I don’t know how it works in the long run, but I assume anyways, that that’s kind of how that cycle happens. I mean, I think back to like, older Scotland or Ireland and you know, just all these tribes that formed.

Northern England, who were dealing with these outside forces and there was just some guy in the group who was like, “look, I’m going to do the best I can to help us all”, and then eventually when they started claiming some independence, that guy or that guy’s family for whatever – for better or worse – they were just kind of the ones who took over as the permanent leaders and [?] one of those little futile governments was set up.

Jad: Yeah. I think that’s probably exactly how it happens, you know?

Kevin: Yeah, and I don’t have a huge conclusion to that, I’m just saying I just think it’s an interesting and a fairly natural product that just kind of occurs of group mentality, really.

Jad: Well and I think that there’s nothing – I mean, human beings do amazing things when they work cooperatively –

Kevin: Right.

Jad: There’s this stupid essay called like, I Am a Pencil or whatever. It was written in like, the 50s or whatever. But this guy basically just goes through like, the 4 million people it takes to like build a pencil, but you know, human beings do this – we exchange with people who are exchanging with people, we exchange subparts, we you know, plan ahead, we follow leaders, we organize ourselves naturally, inherently all the time to get stuff done – everything from like, getting 10 people to order a pizza, to having 38 people go out on a hill, and nowhere does anyone physically threaten somebody in order to get something done except when it’s you know – except when it’s the police, or some maladjusted person, but more frequently when it’s the government coming in to take control of something.

So I think the idea that people are all acting independently, and there is not cooperation, there is no coordination, that’s not really realistic at all. Our greatest faculty is language, and the only purpose of language is coordination and again, wherever you see groups of humans, they’re almost always working with each other to get something done in a completely voluntary in peaceful manner. And I think you’re right – historically it comes from defense, probably.

Kevin: Yeah, I’m sure.

Jad: So it’s like a cast of people that can afford to buy metal to forge breastplates so they can afford to have horses to form cavalry –

Kevin: Right.

Jad: – and they end up being the warrior class, and they’re also the owning class – you know, owning the land – and eventually they end up just kind of ossifying it into a government.

Kevin: Right.

Jad: But again, that’s not required, that’s just historical.

Kevin: No, I suppose that you’re right. I mean, I guess that’s interesting to consider if it is something that has some very statistical likeliness of occurring, or as you say, if it is just historical. I’d be interested to see if there’s a correlation to it.

Jad: Well I think it’s almost certainly the same as something like, say slavery, where before the 19^th century, it was universal. Every society just had slaves – that was part of how the structure of a society was. And again, you can see how that follows, right? You have a warrior class, or a you know, a military class that owns land, and then when they have captives, or you know, people fleeing from other places or whatever, they put those people to work on that land, but they you know, physically own them.

Kevin: Right.

Jad: In a creepy way, it’s a very natural human thing for a society that does not believe that all people are equal, that does not believe that you know, other races are the same as us – believes in a hierarchy with their race, or their particular people at the top. It’s only natural for them to feel like they own the other people, and even make it where it’s a virtue, you know? I’m taking care of these people because they’re too stupid to take care of themselves. I mean, that’s a very common – it’s the white man’s burden, right? It’s like, that’s kind of the rationalization of the humanitarian who owned slaves, right?

Kevin: Right, right.

Jad: But at some point in human evolution, this is what I like – the positive part of progressivism is it does seem to be the case that there is a march forward where the boundaries between people falls, and we understand that yes, the guy who my great grandfather owned his great grandfather is a slave, that was based on a misapprehension that we were different categories of being. But I understand that we’re not and everyone else around the world for the most part, understands that to be the case – so slavery is gone.

Again, if you were to say in the 19^th century, “we’re going to end slavery in the next” – well I’ll say the 17^th century – “we’re going to end slavery by the 19^th century – by the end of it”, people would just be like – it’s just a natural part of things. A, it’s a natural part of things, and B, if we don’t have slaves, then how is all this work going to get done? And then – this is actually a sentence from your book that I picked out, was the one where it’s like – the part where you’re like, “if you propose something is wrong, you need to propose a solution.”

Kevin: Oh, sure.

Jad: I think there’s certain cases where that’s not the case, and slaver is one. “We need to end slavery”, well how are we going to pick all the cotton, right? Well, you won’t have to answer that question. Like, in fact, if you were to say – and this is not my – this is a guy named Stefan Molyneux came up with this analogy – if you were to say, “well what we’re going to do see, is we’re going to dig into the earth and find what the residue of dinosaurs, we’re going to extract that, we’re going to go through a refining process, it’s going to turn into a liquid, they’re going to put that liquid into giant metal machines, and we’re going to set fire to the liquid, and it’s going to turn the machine, and it’s going to harvest the cotton for us.”

And I was just like, you end slavery because slavery is wrong, and then actually not even that you worry about the rest of it later, or you burn that bridge when you come to it or whatever, but you understand that human ingenuity will very, very rapidly begin to solve all of the sub-problems and assemble it into a new system without a central control. As long as you allow it to happen, it will happen. If there’s a need, the need will be met because meeting that need allows people to acquire wealth, which is what most people on the planet are trying to do –

Kevin: Sure.

Jad: – it’s just a very natural process. But when you try to solve the entire think in your head, that’s a very unnatural process and almost impossible.

Kevin: Oh, I agree with that and I think – I guess when I wrote that part I certainly wasn’t thinking of this in mind – but allow me to expand a little bit.

Jad: Go for it.

Kevin: Sure, I mean, I guess the only thing I would say about it is that from the humanitarian or the philosophical side of it, I could not agree with you more. You certainly don’t need to propose a solution because you’ve got this general moral guidance of what is supposed to be right and what is supposed to be wrong, and of course that in and of itself fluctuates over time. For – 300 years ago, as you very rightly pointed out – there was nothing immoral about slavery to begin with, right?

Jad: Right.

Kevin: Now it’s completely immoral to even consider the notion of slavery, even though it does actually still exist in all sorts of ways, but we’re kind of turning a blind eye to those – and my guess is that in another 300 years, society will look back at you know, the early 2000s and say, “well, wait a second, people were indebted to this company for A, B, and C? What’s that all about? That doesn’t make sense? They were enslaved to a company.” But anyways, I guess the other side of that though, and I guess why I feel that the solutions are important – it kind of takes me back to the conversation I was saying about the civil war thing, right?

Like, a proposed solution that you could’ve had – and again, it’s this probably wouldn’t have economically worked but it’s just to start the ball rolling – is to say, “Well look, we don’t really care if you have a slave or not, in fact, you probably don’t even want the slave. What you want are the economic benefits of having a slave – I get that. So how about we buy off your slaves from you” – that’s almost kind of like a king theory, right? Like, you don’t have to convince the humanitarian. You don’t have to convince the philosopher. You don’t have to convince the guy sitting on the side pondering existence of life all day long, you know – the Aristotles – you don’t have to convince that guy.

You have to convince the king who’s sitting the throne saying, “this is the law of the land and I don’t really give a shit, we’re not going to change it”, you need to present the solution to him so that – I guess in my opinion – you can accelerate that moral change because in the absence of it, what it takes is just a great deal of time. And in this particular case using slavery as the example, if you don’t propose a solution, then what you have to do is you have to wait until the society is convinced that slavery actually is immoral. But that took a really long time after the Civil War to accommodate that, and I think that you could’ve addressed that in a much more rapid way.

I think you – I mean this is just speculation – but my guess is that had we actually not had bloodshed over the Civil War, had we found some sort of a solution in order to kind of wean people off of slaves and then end it, my guess is that the whole notion of Civil Rights probably would’ve been very radically different, and certainly wouldn’t have taken 100 years just to start talking about that – is my guess.

Jad: I totally agree with you – I 100% agree. And I see your point to with the solutions, and I wasn’t trying to denigrate solutions, but if you’re just going to say end it, you’re not going to convince people to end it. You have to have a – or not have to –

Kevin: Well there’s certain people – I guess is what I’m saying – that you have – I believe you have to convince.

Jad: Well, right.

Kevin: But you don’t need to be convinced of a moral argument because you’re going to take the moral side of it, and you’re going to say, “yes, we should do this.” Wars for example, the wars going on right now I think are great examples of this. You don’t need to convince me that this is immoral, I don’t need to convince you that this is immoral, but there are many people who have yet to see that because they perceive that there is this threat of terrorism that actually exists right now. The perceive that the United States was attached you know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, and this is specifically a resulting consequence of those people’s actions against us – that’s what people see.

Now I’m not one of those people and you’re not one of those people, and most people you know are not one of those people, but those people exist in record numbers across this country – even though it has dwindled down pretty substantially. My point though is that t for the last many years, I haven’t made the argument to say to people that, “this is ridiculous, we were attached on 9/11 for other reasons, you need to look at 30 years of blowback, you need to look at et cetera, etcetera”, because whilst I agree with all those arguments in a philosophical sense and I can discuss them with you until you know, we’re blue in the face, to that average person, they don’t give a shit about that because they’ve never thought about it, and they’re not going to start thinking about it right now.

But what I can tell them is to say, “hey, do you have any idea how much money this war is costing us? Do you understand why you’re losing your job right now?” All I’m saying is maybe you should consider wrapping some of this war because we’d have a little bit more money to put back into our own economy. And it’s a relevant point too – I mean, it is costing us money – but frankly I don’t even give a shit about the money, I give a shit about the fact that we’re killing innocent people for absolutely no reason other than to kind of wave our feathers at them.

So I guess my point is is to try to say, “Well look, let me circumvent that process or that point of view for the time being, and let me try to appeal to these people in a condescending sort of way”, what is a very much more simplistic attitude, because I think that they would be more willing to look at that point of view and to consider that point of view, and I don’t feel that they’re willing to consider the moral issue.

Jad: Sure, sure. So you’re talking about tailoring your argument to the audience, really.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. So I guess what I’m saying is there has to be something that is going to convince the person who’s not seeing it from a philosophical side, they need something tangible, so I want to find something that’s tangible for them – even if it’s not the best tangible solution, it’s at least something to start the conversation.

Jad: Oh, I totally – I completely understand, that makes sense. I think the other is more of a strategic goal because like I was saying earlier, if someone’s only not waging war because it’s expensive – which is a fantastic way to convince someone to be against the war now – but it’s not a sustainable way to keep people out of a war because at some point, there will come a time when there is a financial advantage for them to have their nation start a war – that they’d brought Haliburton or whatever – then at that point in time, if the rule is if it’s financially disadvantageous for me for the war to happen then I’ll be against it, but otherwise I’m for it, then you’ve lost that person or that group of people. And obviously this is very abstract, but –

Kevin: Right.

Jad: – if the rule is that killing people for no reason is wrong and that’s what you can actually have people reason their way to through whatever system you know – the education or whatever – if they’re able to sit and think and be like, “hmm, well I’m going to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, and I don’t want to be a part of that because that in itself is wrong, regardless of the utilitarian arguments around it”, then you’ve got a sustainable piece. But I mean again, you’re talking about talking to someone tomorrow, I’m talking about some distant future of time, so it’s not really a counter-argument against what you’re saying.

Kevin: Well no – and I agree with you – actually what I would expand upon that in fact because I think it’s a relevant point that gets omitted far too often, is that at some point in time, let’s assume that this war is going to end, or these series of wars are going to end. Let’s assume it’s going to happen in 5 years, right – like a Vietnam sort of thing where eventually we’re just like, “this is fucking ridiculous, we’re done”, eventually people come home, right? And frankly, I don’t actually see that happening in this particular case, but for sake of argument, the problem is as I see it, is that once that happens, the people like you and I tend to stop making the arguments, and maybe I’m completely off base there, but I feel like the people only make those arguments – the philosophical argument – when there’s a need to make that argument, and I think that’s the problem.

I think that in a sense like this, you need to be making both arguments. You need people like you know, making the argument that you’re proposing, and I think you need people making the argument that I’m proposing because the goal is to end the madness, and whatever argument you can make that convinces one person to do that is a step in the right direction. But once that’s all said and done – like once the war has ended, once the last soldier’s home from Vietnam – you don’t get to stop there. You don’t get to say, “okay, now let’s not do that again”, and leave it at that until all of a sudden it happens again and then have to make the same arguments.

I think that’s the time when you have to most ramp up the notion of, “now let’s reflect upon what we did” – let’s really drive this into people’s minds. Let’s let people understand this is completely unnecessary, it’s completely immoral, and this never should happen again. And sure it’s going to happen again, but the hope I suppose, being that each time it happens a little bit less, and maybe that’s too positive an outlook on it, I don’t know.

Jad: Right. Well I think that’s the anarchist argument though is that it has to be comprehensive, otherwise it will inevitably happen again. In other words, if we say we leave Vietnam, but we still have the President, who still has the power to take money from people and build an army and send it somewhere, it’s like your position from the “Everyone is Evil”. If that position exists, that war is going to happen –

Kevin: Oh yeah.

Jad: – and it’s not going to be any less of a war or more of a war necessarily – that all depends upon the economic conditions – but it’s going to happen again. The point is that the same reason that killing some Arab guy is wrong, or putting a guy in from Afghanistan who’s a sheep herder in a cage because you think he’s a terrorist – that’s wrong for the same reason that taking someone’s money to build an army in the first place is wrong.

Kevin: Right.

Jad: The point is that both of those things are violations of a fundamental human freedom that has to exist for everyone in order for there to be peace, and once it does exist for everyone, there is peace and wealth without end, and there’s no limit to what the human species can do once we stop occasionally bombing ourselves back 100 years – or bombing other people back 100 years – and just setting fire to tremendous amounts of wealth for nothing, you know? It’s ridiculous the amount of – again, form the utilitarian perspective – I mean, all of the wealth of the industrial revolution in Europe, all of the wealth of the 19^th century – all of it – was destroyed in the first World War.

Like, all of the improvements of mankind since the first World War have – again, just speaking in an abstract term of wealth – were all generated since 1919. Like, everything before that was destroyed for nothing – nothing at all. The only reason it was destroyed was because of institutions like monarchies and central banks that allowed you know, just endless debt to be piled up to like, buy weapons to send guys off to die for no reason at all.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jad: I mean and there is reason of course if you’re a Czar or whatever, then you’re trying to [?] up the Ottoman empire and there’s a purpose to it, so yeah, it’s not not beneficial for anyone, it’s just not beneficial for almost everyone.

Kevin: Well no, I get your point actually very – I think it’s a great point. I wish we didn’t agree so often actually, it would be better for our program.

Jad: Right.

Kevin: So in the writing that I did, that was a large part of it and actually – going back to that whole LA thing – you know, it was interesting because when I was there, the healthcare bill got signed into law. Like I said, it was my birthday – it was March 23^rd of 2010 that it actually got signed into law – and
a couple weeks before that is when the reconciliation vote happened and you know, they effectively passed it, right – it was going to get signed into law – and you know, everybody out there was really excited about this and you know, I was – I don’t think it was being really the contrarian, but I was just pointing out, “Well wait a second, like, this doesn’t – I’m pretty sure we didn’t do this the right way, and we circumvented all this process, and we haven’t accounted for how this is paid for, you know, all sorts of procedural things that just are completely ignored”, and of course, what everybody out there told me was, they were like, “well you know, whatever.

First of all, we don’t really care about your position, but never the less – like, so what, the republicans have done this for years you know, why should the democrats not do the same thing?” And I feel was a fairly poignant comment to all those people is to say immediately like, “yeah, they have done these things before”, and that’s why we’re engaged in this 8 year war that we were in at the time. So my point is to say maybe it’s not the best way to go about a system of governance, to just trump all these very basic systems of checks and balances, and I guess to the point that you were just saying, I could not agree with you more that once that war has ended or subsided at the very least, you absolutely need to stop the system, you need to disengage from that system.

Effectively, there’s another war in the chamber, so to speak, and you’re just waiting for it to come about because the systems are still there that allow the government to basically perpetuate whatever it wants because it’s got a limitless source of money – at least so the country thinks – and it’s just a matter of time before that next war happens. So I absolutely agree that you need to completely remove those systems from existence at all, and taking it a step further obviously, there was a lot of people calling for criminal investigations of say, the Bush administration. I was all in favor of that, quite frankly.

And of course it’s never going to happen – and in many ways, I would be in favor of the exact same sort of thing for the Obama administration once it’s all said and done for all sorts of these military occupations that that administration has got us involved in unconstitutionally – in my opinion. So I guess the point is that I agree that you don’t get to rest once the war has ended. My point is I think that’s the time when you need to really strike and to shut those systems down so that they can’t happen again. But of course, actually accomplishing that is a whole different can of worms.

Jad: Yeah, for sure. And I think the other slightly disheartening part is that the history of empire is typically the history of reluctant engagement, followed by a period of perpetual engagement, and I think – I think we’re already in the perpetual engagement phase – I think that now is just waiting for the money to run out.

Kevin: Yeah.

Jad: You know, at some point soldiers don’t get paid anymore, they don’t get paid in money that’s worth anything, and then the war ends because they’re not going to fight for free.

Kevin: And so we end on Jad’s proposal that wars end when soldiers don’t get paid. Incidentally, we intend to pick back up next week with a discussion on mercenary armies. As always, thank you so very much for tuning in to the show, and we hope you enjoyed the content. If you haven’t yet seen our website, please take a moment to check out other episodes at www.JKPod.com. You can also reach either of us individually – Jad is at Jad-Davis.com, that’s J-A-D dash D-A-V-I-S dot com, and I am at KevinLudlow.com, that’s K-E-V-I-N-L-U-D-L-O-W dot com – we’d certainly love to hear from you. Thanks again, and we’ll talk to you next week.