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via Realeyesation: Don’t miss this great conversation between Alexander Raskovic and the renowned James Corbett from ‘The Corbett Report.’ Discover how James Corbett became a voluntaryist and an Anarchist, and how James and Alexander discovered the methods of self-learning (autodidacticism).
VIDEO COURTESY REALEYESATION: ODYSEE / ODYSEE (NO BACKGROUND MUSIC) RUMBLE / YOUTUBE
TRANSCRIPT
ALEXANDER RASKOVIC: Welcome, everybody. My name is Alexander. You are listening to another “RealEYESation.” And today we’re doing something quite special! I will be interviewing someone who I admire dearly and who will certainly enrich us with a lot of knowledge and valuable information. Today I have the privilege to speak to the one and only James Corbett. James Corbett is an award-winning investigative journalist who started The Corbett Report in 2007 with the intent of creating an outlet for independent, critical analysis of politics, society, history, science and economics. He is renowned for the thousands of hours of audio and video media that he made for the website and also for his podcasts and several online video series.
I personally discovered James Corbett’s work through his excellent documentaries on 9/11, which I encourage you to watch as well. Now, the topics of discussion where James has particularly piqued my attention are voluntaryism and anarchism, since those are the subjects that I primarily talk about on this platform. Knowing that James is and has been a voluntaryist and an anarchist for many years, I have the honor of hosting him on RealEYESation today. So, James welcome to RealEYESation. How are you doing today?
JAMES CORBETT: I’m doing great. Thank you for having me here.
AR: Thank you so much for being here. Now, James, I wanted to ask you: How did you become a voluntaryist?
JC: I think that is a good question. And, if I wanted to answer that philosophically, I would say that I think human beings fundamentally are voluntaryist by nature and they have to be trained into not being voluntaryist. Maybe that’s a controversial opinion, because, obviously, when you look around, most of the people that we encounter in our daily life, most of the time, almost without exception, are statists. Whatever the particular political flavor they prefer, they do think that the the governmental systems that we live under are the natural state of being. I would posit that in fact, no. Humans are remarkably adaptable and that, of course, is part of “the ultimate resource” that Julian Simon talks about—our brains being “the ultimate resource,” because that makes us almost, I won’t say infinitely, but very, very malleable and adaptable to different circumstances, including the circumstances that may not be in our best interests, like ones where rulers are put in positions of authority over us.
But perhaps that is too philosophical a way of answering your question. I suppose, more practically, I could say that I do recall the moment—I don’t recall whether it was in junior high school or high school—but I do recall, in a political science course I was taking at the time, encountering the ideas of John Locke for the first time and thinking that the idea of classical liberalism definitely, immediately seemed intuitively right to me. There was no question, once I started to encounter those ideas, that: “Oh, clearly I believe something like this.” It took many years of fleshing out what that really means and taking it to its logical conclusion point. I was still a statist for many, many years.
I don’t know whether I was blessed or cursed to have grown up in Canada, in the Canadian public education system—indoctrination system—where most people are socialist by default, I think what would be the way to say it. The idea of questioning the existence or necessity of government itself is almost unthinkable to most Canadians. But, in a way, perhaps it gave me an arm’s length remove from the type of philosophy and political science and thinking that was going on in the American Revolution. We did not study that deeply in our Canadian public schooling system. So when I encountered that as an adult many years later on, I was able, I think, to remove from all of the propaganda that obviously surrounds subjects like that. I was able to look at the political philosophy of the writings of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and others obviously influenced by Locke and start to see the inherent appeal of the idea of, say, the Declaration of Independence—one of the few political documents that I can get behind.
So I think that was the beginning of the penny drop. The penny, of course, takes some time to work its way down the machine and to actually drop. So the old joke is: “What’s the difference between a libertarian and an anarchist?” The answer is: “A few years, if you’re being honest with yourself.” That’s about right in my case. It did take me a few years to go from an understanding, “Clearly, I am on the libertarian side of things, I do believe in classical liberal philosophy,” [to voluntaryism]. It took a while for me to play that out and to really realize that, at base, there is no moral justification or any magical voting incantation that can be performed to confer rights that don’t exist onto people wearing funny badges and funny hats.
AR: I completely agree with you there, James. You know, it is the exemption for morality, if you will, that we envision these people to have, in some strange way, like, “Well, how does that person suddenly get the right to rule somebody else? Because the majority wanted to be so? Because they wrote it down on a piece of parchment? Because they changed the words around?” So, yeah, I definitely agree with you there.
JC: Well, the funny thing is that we can scoff at the propaganda that was used in the past to justify rule in times long ago. For example, the Divine Right of rule, which, of course, the European monarchies um uh invoked as a justification for their role over their subjects, which, in this day and age, most people rightly scoff at—except when they apparently celebrate the coronation of King Charles, or what have you. But most people realize that the Divine Right to rule is just ridiculous. Why did anyone believe that? I am confident that centuries from now people will look at our magical invocations of voting or election rituals or whatever that we seem to use to legitimate things that have nothing to do with proper human morality—we will look at that hundreds of years from now as, “How did people ever believe that?”
AR: Absolutely. I agree with you completely. It’s the same exact religion. Only this time, it’s not a rulership of a king or a queen, it’s a rulership of a bunch of politicians, which is just the same thing. It’s a bunch of human beings thinking that they have the right to rule everybody.
JC: It is. So, the real question then becomes, “How do we rightfully unseat that illegitimate authority in the minds of the people?” I think we have to put the emphasis on that place, because, as I say, I think that people have to be indoctrinated into becoming statists, or to feeling themselves to be statists. So I think there has to be a process of unindoctrination to get them to realize that, “No, you are a free, sovereign, individual human being, and no one can abrogate your most fundamental human rights.”
AR: I agree completely. Schooling systems in general never teach you to make your own conclusions. They tell you what your conclusion should be because the authorities told you. So, by default, you don’t have a solid epistemology—a basis for how you know what you know, if that makes sense. So, by default, there is a huge void in their understanding of, okay, stealing from other people is wrong, but suddenly these people get the right to do blatantly moral things that none of us have the right to do. They’ve never been taught how they made that jump—how do we go from a basic understanding of morality to an exemption from morality by a bunch of politicians.
JC: Indeed, it is a sticky philosophical issue. And I don’t want to trivialize it. I don’t think it does any service to our argument to argue that this is a simple process of obvious and straightforward logic, because we have to view this in the context of the vast scope of human history, in which most people have been subjected to brutal, violent rule throughout most of human history. And political governments come along in various pacts—at least promising to tone down the violence in return for certain powers that are granted to people who get into positions of power.
So, as a result, of of that we can look at the governments in the status system that exists as a type of truce between ruling oligarchs and the people: “We will agree not to breach certain areas some of the time as long as you pledge your fealty to us through this process and allow us the fundamental right to own the geographical territory we claim to own.”
That is a sticky practical problem: “How do we move from a system that is governed in this particular way to an actually free society?” I can very much understand the system that we’re living in today and I can very much understand what a free society would be and how it would operate. But the transition can go in a lot of different ways. And it may not be to the betterment of all humanity, given that we are playing a rigged game.
When you suddenly take the rules off the game and say, “Okay, now you can play freely.” Well, clearly, certain people who have benefited from the rigged game for decades, centuries, generations, are in a different starting position in the suddenly free game. And you can’t blame people who have been hobbled their entire lives generationally, perhaps, for not doing well in such a game.
So, there are many, many considerations to take into account here, and I don’t want to trivialize them. But, having said that, I think the goal of maximizing human freedom is a laudable goal and one that we should be aimed at. It’s a question of how we get from here to there.
AR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the basic understanding that no person could ever have the right to rule—that there is no pseudo-religious ritual out there that could give a human being like you and me the right to control other people and use threats of violence to enforce their will onto other people—once that basic understanding becomes consistent, not just from a basic philosophical standpoint, [but in practice. Tthen they will realize] what you said at the beginning: Everybody by default is a voluntaryist from the inside.
Everybody knows that it’s wrong to harm another person. Yet they have been indoctrinated into believing that some people can have an exemption from that. Once people understand that there is no exemption from morality and that we have to figure things out without that logical inconsistency, [then they will see that] that idea just doesn’t make any sense, and it’s actually the worst idea ever. [It] has led to this condition over and over and over again throughout our history. [Seeing that] is when humanity will actually flourish.
JC: I agree. I certainly wouldn’t want to make this a consequentialist argument. But I do believe that human flourishing would increase in a free society over the type of ruled and controlled system that we have now. And so, for people for whom consequentialism is a persuasive viewpoint, then perhaps we could detail that as well.
There are many many many mental obstacles that people have to get over on their journey from being a statist to realizing the natural human state of individual sovereign human freedom. And, unfortunately, it is the case that everyone thinks that they are coming up with these objections for the first time and no one has ever thought about it! “But how would you deal with violence in a free society?” “Obviously, you need police, you need jails, you need all of this.”
Anyway, it is funny that everyone seems to think that no one has ever thought of these objections and no one has ever written books about them before. But one of the things that I think is fundamental to underline—especially, again, for those with the consequentialist line of thought here—is that there is a very deeply ingrained (and, actually, perhaps this is an intuitive sense that most people have) that in order for any sort of complicated process to come about, it must be managed. And it must be managed by, presumably, if not a single individual, at least a central group that can control of all of these various processes.
And it is extremely, extremely important for people to realize the counter-intuitive—but I think demonstrably true—reality: that spontaneous order is actually capable of creating much more elaborate and much more stable systems than any topdown centrally managed system could. It is more efficient.
And what do I mean by spontaneous order?
I always cite Leonard Reed’s essay, “I, Pencil,” because it’s the simplest and easiest way to understand this, but it is really profound in its implications. And, of course, Leonard Reed’s “I, Pencil” is narrated from the viewpoint of a pencil, who is claiming “I am a miraculous object because no one in the world knows how to put me together.” Immediately you think, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Here’s a pencil. There’s a pencil factory down the street. What’s the big deal?”
But as the essay develops, it goes on to talk about all of the different constituent materials that have to be mined and extracted and brought to a centralized location and then treated via various processes and then moved on to another place, where they are eventually put together. And all of the people involved in all of these processes, and then all of the people who are helping all of those people: the farmer who grows the food that feeds the worker in the mine in Ceylon who gets the . . . etc., etc.
And you start to realize that the simple act of the creation of this pencil involves the coordination of the efforts of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands—how far out do we extend this bubble? Perhaps millions of people are ultimately involved in some way in helping to bring all of these materials together and to create this pencil in a way that, once you understand the true scope of it, of course, no one person could even possibly keep track of all of that activity let alone coordinate it and manage it. And yet it happens.
And when we start to expand this out [we realize that] of course this isn’t about the creation of pencils. This is about the creation of everything of complexity and omport in our society. It’s about the sum total of productive human activity which takes place not because of some coordinated centrally managed clique of people who are who are stewarding over this process, but in spite of the fact that there are centralized cliques of power that presume to be able to regulate and tell people how to live their lives.
So, once we start to understand the spontaneous order that makes a very complex processes possible, we can start to reconceptualize some of, I think, the core objections that people have to the idea of freedom. Because we, unfortunately in the statist system that we live in, tend to think that these types of systems need topdown control in order to function. But they do not. And once we start toppling some of those barriers, we start to—hopefully, at least—convince some of the people in the crowd who otherwise would have their their consequentialist objections: “But if people were free, how would we do X, Y or Z?”
Well, there are many different ways to envision this. As I would like to stress, I guarantee— guarantee!—anyone listening to this conversation who has some sort of “But but what about this?” [objection], I guarantee there are entire books that have been written about your objection, answering them. It’s good to have questions and to ask them—absolutely.
But I hope that people who do have objections to what we are saying would trouble themselves to actually look up how those objections have been countered and whether or not they think those arguments are persuasive.
AR: Exactly. And that’s actually the underlying philosophy as well. Most people will might come up with a straw man of, “Well, we’re talking about no hierarchies and no leadership.” We’re certainly not talking about no hierarchies. This is where basic voluntaryism and true anarchism are put into the category of communism—or whatever communism has done to the philosophy of anarchism.
That’s not at all what it’s about. It is absolutely not as if we’re talking about there is no such thing as hierarchies, no such thing as leadership. It is all about voluntary interaction. Of course you will need those sort of things. But we’re talking about nothing essentially imposed on you with violence. It is all a voluntary society and everything will be done based on your consent. Nobody will transgress upon your right to decide what to spend your money on or what you decide to spend your time on.
And that’s basically voluntaryism, isn’t it?
JC: That’s exactly right. And so, again, of course, all of the most basic precepts of this need to be stressed and restressed and re-elaborated every time it is brought up, because people have a hard time understanding what is even being said. But of course this is not a license to escape the bonds of morality, which include, of course, the obvious injunction against violating anyone else’s bodily autonomy, anyone else’s property. Anything you seek to do that will violate someone else’s personal sovereignty is obviously verboten under a system of voluntary association. So it isn’t just some sort of license to do anything. Of course not!
AR: Exactly.
JC: But it is a license to do anything that is not encroaching on, infecting, abrogating, or breaching the bodily sovereignty or property of another person. Of course, there will be boundaries that come into conflict. So conflict resolution will be part of a free society as well. Of course it will. And, yes, of course there will be courts of adjudication, etc., etc.
There are many different ways to envision how that will happen in a free society. But one way that obviously would not happen in a free society is the monopoly imposition of a singular police force and a singular court system. . .
AR: Exactly . . .
JC: . . . that everyone is beholden to because they happen to be born in a certain geographical area. That obviously breaches the individual personal sovereignty that is the core of voluntaryism. So, again, there are many many many incredibly important questions. These are not small things that have to be ironed out.
But one thing that is also important to understand is that in a truly voluntary society, there would be many different communities that would choose to adjudicate, for example, boundary conflicts between people and other such things in different ways. And, again, [as] part of the voluntary nature of society, you would be able to choose: “I agree, I consent to these rules. I will live with this community. I consent to this.
And, as I often am at pains to say, if we could envision such a world, I do not think it would be a case of “Let the best community win,” as if there would be one winner that would obviously be so much better than all of the others. Different people will choose different things to comport with their own ideas, their own ideology, their own knowledge base, their own viewpoint, their own world view. Who am I to judge whether or not this person should be living in that community, choosing to go by these rules, or choosing to go by those [rules]?
Again, that’s the mindset of the statist, who thinks there needs to be a topdown imposition of authority that blanket-covers a geographical area but magically stops at the invisible, intangible borders of that geographical area—which is part of the unicorn-believing nonsense that statists get into when they start believing in what has been called—and rightfully so—”the ultimate superstition.”
[They believe in] the magical authority of pieces of paper, where people . . . vote, and then some people [politicians] write something down on a piece of paper and it has magical authority within these invisible, intangible boundaries of this geographical area. Total lunacy! Utter nonsense! But it makes sense in the minds of the statists. We have to do everything we can to make people see the self-evident nonsense that they have been trained into believing.
AR: I agree completely. Now, James, you started in 2007. And [since then] you’ve covered so many topics! Your research is absolutely startling! I was also bewildered to understand that you’re also an autodidact. Am I correct?
JC: Well, yes, I certainly didn’t take any media production courses. I am completely 100% self-taught.
AR: That is absolutely amazing. So where did the journey of self-learning start for you?
JC: I would say from birth. Similar to voluntaryism and free association, I think people are fundamentally born autodidacts. I think that is how humans work. Children are naturally curious and naturally learn by doing and trying things and failing and being corrected and continuing and getting more feedback, etc. That is the natural process of learning. It seems strange that we have to unlearn that, in a way, and come to believe that the only way to learn something is by going to some room for “X” hours a day, “X” days a week to learn from an accredited teacher and then to regurgitate something on a test, and you get a piece of paper that says “I know this thing.” That seems fairly arbitrary and not something that most people hundreds of years ago would have recognized as the process of achieving competence in any given area.
So, to answer your question more philosophically than perhaps it demands, I would say I’ve always been an autodidact and so have you. But, more realistically, it is interesting, because I studied English literature, and that was what I got my degree in. The only thing I could say about that was that I was never going to become a teacher, I was never going to become a journalist—and then I ended up somehow becoming both!
Specifically, when it comes to the journalism side of it or the podcasting side of it—it was, in a sense, a conscious knowledge that [while] I’ve never gone to media school—I don’t know what I’m doing technically, technologically, in terms of how to speak in front of a camera and how to convey this information—I’ve always figured that as a bonus, as a plus on my side. Because it was self-evident that what I was reacting to was the institutionalized journalism of the corporate-controlled mainstream media that had obviously occluded so much from my attention over the years that I thought, “Well, if I’m not do approaching it like those people who went to journalism school and did all of this, then perhaps I have a leg up. Because I’m just going to do it as seems natural to me, and I’m going to learn by doing.”
And that is exactly the process by which I have achieved whatever I’ve achieved, for whatever that is worth. It has come from learning by doing and receiving feedback and correcting and improving, but always trying things and then “failing to fail,” I guess would be the way to say it!
I often tell people: “Don’t go back to Episode #1 of my podcast.” But if you do, you’ll see it was terrible audio production quality, it was not very professional in any sense. But it was the genuine expression of a person who was trying his best and just trying to do something. And I kept doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it and hopefully improving along the way.
I liken it, in fact, to the well-known fact, for anyone certainly who’s tried to learn multiple languages in their life: it is much, much easier for children to pick up languages than it is for adults. And I think one of the reasons for that is because children are natural-born autodidacts who haven’t learned how not to learn yet. They simply try. They start speaking. They start attempting to communicate. And they get feedback. And they get corrected. And they get better and better—until they are fluent in that language.
That is something that’s difficult for adults to do, because we have forgotten that fundamental autodidactic process by which we have to just start and try and completely fall flat on our face, failing miserably, until we can continue and continue and continue and persevere until we have competence in that area.
So, again, I think everyone in the crowd is an autodidact. They may have just forgotten it along the way.
AR: I agree, I agree. Were there any particular methods that you used? Being an autodidact myself, I had much success using the Trivium method, which is an excellent way of starting from what you know and then juxtaposing that to the unrealities, which is also known in philosophy as epistemology. So were there any methods that you utilized?
JC: I don’t know if this is ironic or if it seems contradictory, but, to me, it seems to stem from what I was saying earlier. I certainly didn’t study about how to be an autodidact, and I didn’t employ any particular method, other than what occurred to me naturally to do, which is, as I say, to continue doing something over and over, while continuing to try to improve that thing based on corrective feedback. That is the basic mechanism of it. And if that iterative process is applied enough times, I think it almost can’t fail to produce improvement.
Certainly there are limits to what autodidacticism can do. I could apply autodidactic processes to the process of me becoming an NBA player all I want. I’m never going to become an NBA player. So there are certain of course limits that are inherent in this. But at the very least I could improve my basketball skills if I continued to practice and practice. As long as I had a realistic vision of what I wanted to achieve and how to achieve it, I’m sure that could be reached. So, there are limits to this. But, as I say, I think it’s mostly a sort of natural process—at least for me.
I’m not dismissing or poo-pooing people who want to study and employ certain rigorous methods of learning and understanding, like the Trivium. It’s just that I didn’t consciously apply that in my own case, because I didn’t really feel that I needed to learn about the process of learning. It seemed quite intuitive to me. I think, actually, that is the key thing—the thing that I brought up earlier: to have the realistic vision of what it is you are trying to achieve, to have that as clearly defined as possible, preferably before you start doing whatever it is that you’re doing, so that you at the very least can discern whether or not you are making progress toward your goal.
As long as you have that goal in mind, then you can adjudicate what you are doing—whether it is getting you closer towards that goal or further away from it. That kind of corrective feedback then can lead you in the direction that you want to go. I think that is the very very basic algorithm for learning. As long as you have that under your belt. . . .
Again, if various methods work for people, that’s great. But I’m not sure that there needs to be a very complicated philosophy surrounding it.
AR: I agree completely. What you’ve just said, James, resonates completely with me. It’s just that I’ve also stumbled upon the method later during my life, and [the Trivium method] was more resonant with what I’ve been doing earlier, only it made things a little easier, knowing the logical fallacies and knowing how to spot logical inconsistencies. And, yeah, it entangles so nicely with the basic nature of autodidacticism, as you’ve described it just yet.
JC: Absolutely. Now, having said all of that, the fact that I was an English major perhaps actually does have some bearing on this. Because if there was one thing that I actually did learn, or at least practice enough to become relatively competent at, it was taking information, taking data, finding a thesis that I was looking to support, finding the way to construct this data so that I could present it to someone in a finished form that would, hopefully, if I’ve done my job correctly, be persuasive to them that my thesis was correct.
That’s a very, very basic broad overview of what it is you’re doing when you write those essays or final term papers or what have you back in your university days. That’s certainly what I did many times. And, in a sense, that’s what I continue to do—just in a very, very different format and [on] very different subject matter than I ever would have envisioned back in my early schooling days.
But that is, I think, part of what I do, and that has served me well throughout my life, so far. Having said that, I’m not sure I really needed to go to university to learn that. But at any rate, that is an important part of what I do.
AR: Excellent. James, you are an absolute wealth of knowledge, and I really appreciate your time. Where can people find out more about you and The Corbett Report?
JC: The best place to go is my website. It is corbettreport.com—that’s c-o-r-b-e-t-t-report.com. I am on various social media platforms, although not YouTube anymore, because, unfortunately, YouTube does not like people talking about sensitive and horrible subject matter—like the philosophy of science, which is actually a video that ultimately got my channel scrubbed.
So, unfortunately, censorship is very much in operation. I am on a number of social media platforms, but the best place to go is just to go to corbettreport.com directly. You will always be able to find my work there. And it’s all available for free. I don’t put anything behind a paywall. I do have a subscriber newsletter, but actually the editorial that is the substance of that newsletter is completely 100% presented for free every week on my Substack, corbettreport.substack.com.
So I try to keep the information out there. I try to cite my sources and put it all out there. It’s a resource, and I hope people will use it as such. And, of course, if they do get any anything out of it, I hope that they would support this work so that I do it in the future. But that’s completely optional.
AR: Excellent. Well, this has been another RealEYESation interview. It has been excellent. Thank you so much for watching. And I’ll see you next time.
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