Stefan Molyneux's Fall of Rome - A Response

hello there this is a video about stefan molyneux and in particular his video the truth about the fall of rome modern parallels now his video is two and a half hours long but I decided to take a look at it anyway for two main reasons firstly I love talking about Rome I'm a big Roman history fan and secondly a particular pet peeve of mine is people cherry-picking from Roman history an ancient history in general to support some modern ideology not that I'm suggesting we should ignore history or that there are no specific parallels between the ancient world and the modern because I think there are plenty of legitimate points of comparison nor do I have any problem in particular with historical revisionism if it's done for the right reasons if you find new evidence to support or disprove some facets of current historical knowledge excellent revised history now what bothers me is people who approach history with a specific modern political agenda and oh boy the stefan molyneux have a political agenda now there's plenty of things that are going to go wrong when you try to apply contemporary political leanings to the ancient world you will end up missing things out that contradict your bias and over emphasizing certain things that support it and you might end up being guilty of what Aldous Huxley would call temporal oversimplification and compressing or stretching the timeline to suit your narrative and this is of particular note when we're talking about Roman history ancient Roman civilization existed in so many forms and for so long that there's more than enough evidence to support any sort of modern political leaning that is as long as you're very selective about it Rome was at times a kingdom a republic and Empire first a city-state that grew to control the Italian peninsula and then the whole of the Mediterranean and it existed for an enormous length of time it was a republic for about 500 years the Western Empire fell after another 500 years and the eastern half of the Empire lasted for another thousand after the and actually something to keep in mind going forward is that the entire history of the United States of America from the Declaration of Independence to today can fit neatly inside just what is considered the decline period of the Western Roman Empire trying to condense this wealth of history and apply it to just the last few decades of modern politics in the West is well difficult to say the least and I'm mentioning all this now because stefan molyneux bless him does all of this in his video he's going to take his square peg views and try to hammer them into the round hole of Roman history for two and a half hours about what are Stefan's views you might be wondering well for the uninitiated he's anti state anti taxes Pro free market and in particular he doesn't much like women to put it lightly and he applies this thinking relentlessly to basically everything all the time and before we get to Rome actually I've invented a game called what is stefan molyneux talking about and I'm going to show you some clips and you have to try and guess the subject of the video that the clip came from for men an attack from the male's of another tribe was the greatest evil if the men have tribe be attacking conquer tribe a the men of tribe a would generally be killed off or enslaved along with their descendants that's effectively ending the transmission of their genes the women however would usually be taken as spoils of war which would allow the continuation of their genetics thus men are conditioned by evolution to guard the tribal parameters and fight to the death that's from his video about Zootopia next clip feminists portray man is evil and patriarchal in order to provoke the white knight protects the eggs response that actually characterizes historical masculinity while single mothers have to pretend that all men are shiftless and irresponsible otherwise they themselves will be blamed by their children who are force to grow up poor and fatherless almost always the same thing because their mother chose to mate with a bad man or drove away a good man which is even worse and that's from his video about Star Wars The Force awakens and the last one now young men are worth substantially less in the sexual marketplace than young women because young men do not have a lot of resources to provide to pregnant pregnant and child-raising women while young women have a decade or two of fertility ahead of them young women so often mistake their sexual appeal for personal value since it is infinitely easier to giggle and surf the tsunami of male desires than it is to struggle for a life of virtue and meaning and that's from his video about the movie frozen and if you watched frozen and came away talking about human fertilization and the sexual marketplace well you know you definitely took a wrong turn somewhere now I can't tell if Stefan is actually sitting there watching children's movies and genuinely get no legs aspirated or if he just fuse these recent popular movies as good vehicles for him to get his ideology to a wider audience and it's tempting to just talk about Stefan on movies to be honest but we're here for ancient Rome right now we'll save the movies for another day so let's get to it because this is about saving Western civilization we look deep into the past so that we can control the future and your past has been so falsified to you so lied about you know they constantly say oh the only thing that's constant in history is how little people learn from their history now you can absolutely learn from your history you can save everything that our ancestors worked so hard to provide to us but you must first know the facts about your history and when you understand the facts about your history which have been so falsified that you live in a matrix of leftist propaganda rather than any basic empirical facts once you understand your history we can we might have the possibility with this technology this new Gutenberg press off the internet we might have the chance of stopping the 10 generation cycle of empire cycle of civilization in its tracks we might be able to pile up enough facts reason evidence and knowledge and courage that we can stop the giant grim stone wheel of history from crushing yet another civilization as it seems poised to do with the West well now who's ready to stop history so we're going to go through Stefan's video and examine what he claims all the parallels to the modern Western world and as I said his video is two and a half hours long so for sanity's sake I've decided to cut a lot for time and just focus on a few specific areas otherwise we'll be here all day but just so you can be sure I'm not misrepresenting Stefan's arguments here I'd encourage you all to go and watch Stefan's video Who am I kiddin ok let's move on to our first section now in 58 BC is as we said run began distributing free grain and this board huge numbers of the rural poor into rum there was the again with evidence mass kind of movement there's a push and there's a pull the pull was that there was free grain the push was the massive influx of slaves from the empire that the rural poor could not compete with now by the reign of Julius Caesar three hundred and twenty thousand people were on this welfare dole now the expansion of the dole of the welfare state drove steep rises in Roman taxes and if you're a citizen farmer and you can compete with all the slave labor right I mean then you have a big problem you end up leaving your farm going to the city and living on welfare they were a burden on the state and what did they have to do with their time well not much except cause trouble and contribute to an ever-increasing crime rate ah now that that's got to be just a coincidence and and this sort of one-to-one comparison is the standard for the rest of Stefan's video the displaced Roman farmers become the modern urban poor Western democratic governments become the Roman Empire modern immigrants into the West are cast as both the cheap Roman slave labor and later on the invading barbarian tribes so here he's comparing Rome's grain Dole to our modern idea of the welfare state and citing it as one of the reasons that the Empire fell and now I hate to start this section off with such a minor point but see here where Stefan writes the conquests of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC brought so many slaves into the Empire well that doesn't really make sense because the Empire didn't exist at that point and it didn't exist until August's a few hundred years later what Stefan means to say is slaves were brought into the Republic not the Empire now I'm not suggesting Stefan was trying to mislead anyone with this he later writes Republic in this section even so I think saying Empire here was just an honest error I'm only highlighting it here because it's an indicator of the enormous length of time that Stefan is compressing so history lessened time before Rome straight grained old there was a grain subsidy which was one of the reforms brought about under the Tribune ships of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and they were two Roman politicians who tried to address the economic inequality brought about by slavery forcing all the poorer farmers into unemployment and Gaius Gracchus passed a grain law in 1 2 3 BC that set aside a certain amount of state grain to be distributed to the poor at a reduced cost and this subsidized grain eventually became free grain in 58 BC which was about 500 years before the Western Empire fell and indeed about 30 years before the Roman Empire even existed so if the grain Dahl was one of the reasons the Empire fell it took kind of a long time to kick in and I'd like to hear Stefan's solution to this apparent grain dole problem earlier he says the answers are obvious but political correctness prevents us from talking about them whatever that means stopping the grain dole would mean food riots and starvation in the capital at bear it's not like those people could just go and get jobs you know slaves had all the jobs really the grain Dole was a sensible state expenditure that you know beyond it being generally quite nice to feed the hungry if you're able to it was necessary to prevent the poor from getting their torches and pitchforks out but Stefan doesn't like stays expenditures in general not even sensible ones but it wasn't just the Roman army entire layers of bureaucracy grew you know like how we have national governments in Europe and then we have the additional layer of the European Union I guess except for the United Kingdom recently so originally it was just like Rome province city boom one two three that was it by the time of Diocletian 284 to 305 ad there were four Emperor's for Imperial courts for Praetorian guards four palaces etc kind of a lot of overhead so let's talk about Diocletian here Stefan is presenting the Tetrarchy which is the common name for the time when Rome had four emperors as an example of the growth of government bureaucracy now what he fails to mention is why the Tetrarchy was instituted and since diocletian's reforms are generally considered to have prevented the early collapse of the empire I think this is worth exploring so history lesson time again in the third century AD the Roman Empire went through what has been come to be known as the crisis of the third century which as you can probably guess wasn't a terribly fun time for the Romans there were invasions plague civil wars assassinated emperors the Empire split into three separate empires for a while it was it was like Game of Thrones now the Ascension of Diocletian and his following reforms typically marked the end of the crisis he basically brought the Empire back from the brink of collapse and stabilized it for a while at least until he resigned and yes he resigned he was the emperor of Rome the most powerful man in the world and he resigned and went to farm cabbages so Diocletian was a pretty interesting guy all around as long as you weren't Christian anyway and one of the more interesting reforms was the Tetrarchy the rule of four so let's talk about that now the Roman emperors during the crisis of the third century had a few relevant problems here first was the succession of emperors the transfer of power from one to another quite often his assassin was usually a very dangerous time next was the size of the Empire which made it extremely difficult for one man to rule by himself he couldn't be everywhere at once and you don't want to get attacked on two fronts when it can take months for a message from one front to reach the other and you don't want to give too many troops and too much power to any one of your generals in particular because if they end up winning their battles they might turn around and march on you and kill you and become the new Emperor because after all that's probably how you got into power as well and another problem here is Rome the city Rome was not as it turns out all that well situated at least in certain circumstances you know an emperor based in Rome is going to take a very long time to reach and respond to anything of note happening near the borders of his empire now diocletian's response to these problems was first to appoint a co Emperor and later they each appointed a Junior Emperor and they divided their territory thusly now the result of this was that the Empire was able to fight effectively on multiple fronts with multiple leaders in regional capitals who all had the ability to exert power with some level of autonomy and there was a more formalized line of succession from junior to senior Emperor and at least while Diocletian was around it worked and yes it was a massive increase in state bureaucracy but it brought an end to the crisis of the third century now Stephon condenses all this history into one sentence about the growth of government and this is really emblematic of his oversimplification of history in general in Stefan's history it goes no grain dull grain Dahle instituted Rome collapses one Emperor for Emperor's Rome collapses and this radical simplification of huge stretches of time is misleading but it's necessary in order to make the sorts of comparisons to modern times Stefan is making and now at one point Stefan offers a more direct contemporary comparison as the parasites overwhelmed the host you have a huge problem so up to a third about a third of the people in Rome at certain periods were dependent on the state for their survival and as Mitt Romney pointed out I think it was in 2012 it's pretty hard for Republicans to get elected because close to half of the American population rely on the state for all or significant portions of their income so why would they vote for a shrinkage of the state and now there's a lot of things wrong with this comparison first of all stuff an mentions it's difficult for the Republicans to get elected and well it was very difficult indeed for anyone to be elected emperor because they didn't have elections but let's talk about Mitt Romney's 47% comments and for those who haven't seen it here is that leaked recording there are 47 percent of the people who evolved to the president another one all right the 47% will with him who are the plaintiff on government we believe that they're victims we believe that government has a responsibility to care for them who believe that they are entitled to health care to food housing do you think these are people who pay no income tax 47% of Americans pay no income tax so our message of local taxes doesn't connect and SOI cup is not to worry about those people on every day so they should take personal responsibility and care over the life now here's the problem Mitt Romney was full of [ __ ] he claims that this 47% of people will vote for the president no matter what but if you look at the actual reasons as to why some of that 47% pay no federal income tax that claim is quickly exposed as delusional first off a large part of that 47% are the elderly who in one sense do depend on state welfare but certainly did not exclusively vote for Barack Obama believe it or not and aside from the elderly so the working poor who despite having a job don't earn enough to pay federal income tax and there's exemptions for things like households with young children and notably the rich don't pay federal income tax because they know how to avoid it and they're certainly not voting overwhelmingly for Barack Obama either and let's briefly address Stefan's point where he says that it's hard to get people to vote for a contraction of the state when they're dependent on it so we can infer from that that he thinks the Republicans are for contracting the state and reducing spending and I know they say they're for that but the most recent Republican president george w bush oversaw an enormous percentage increase in government spending way more than Bill Clinton wars aren't cheap it turns out and if you're for reducing state spending then the recent history of the Republican Party should turn you right off anyway let's get back to Rome and move on to our next section so we're going to start off this section by looking at a quote about women from Stefan's conclusion to its video and then we'll work backwards from that now here's a quote I put this out there for discussion I have not figured out all of my perspectives on this I put this out for our discussion we'll put the source to this below an increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline the later Romans complained that although Rome ruled the world women ruled Rome in the 10th century a similar tendency was observed in the Arab Empire the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolized by men what wrote the contemporary historian hidden Bosson have the professions of clerk tax collector or preacher to do with women these occupations have always been limited to men alone many women practice law while others obtained posts as university professors there was an agitation for the appointment of female judges which however does not appear to have succeeded soon after this period government and public order collapsed and foreign invaders over ran the country the resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move una' scored it in the streets with the result that this feminist movement collapsed I leave you to ponder that one and please let me know what you think in the comments so there you go once women are given power civilizations collapse I've heard that one before but it's okay though Stephon didn't really say that of course he just quoted someone else saying it he just threw it out there totally randomly just as a topic for discussion now this tactic is sneakily hiding behind his source is especially funny here because until that points the fan had in his conclusion been quoting almost verbatim from that same source which is Sir John globs the fate of Empires and let's take a look like I don't know where bomb some small group kind of ignored beforehand just explodes and grows and spreads and this disorder that the pioneers is a bursting out and rather than virtue an action there is this interminable engagement in intellectual debate but these intellectual arguments they rarely lead to any kind of agreement because and it's kind of tragic you know way back in the day used to have just a very few number of elite intellectual institutions you know Harvard and Cambridge and Oxford and so on and now it's like every city every town every block it sometimes seems them so through this process of debate rather than action there tends to be an intensification of hostilities in the political realm there is an influx of foreigners right because it's a wealthy region in Rome and Greece and the West is wealthy so people want to get in and so there's an end to sort of cultural or ethnic homogeneity and we can just look at New York unis walk around the streets of New York and see how many descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are around the heroes of empires in seemingly terminal decline are always the same you got your athletes you got your singer you got your pretty person you got your actor and so if we look at way back at Arab empires in Baghdad in the golden days of Harun al-rashid the Arabs were actually a minority in the capital imperial city of Istanbul and this is in the great days or in the significant or powerful days of Ottoman rule now did you notice that he [ __ ] that last one up he accidentally read out two sentences as if they were one sentence and as a result he created a history Frankenstein's monster Istanbul is somehow the capital of Baghdad and haroon al-rashid who lived in the 700s is now the leader of the Ottoman Empire somehow which didn't even exist for another 500 years so Stefan is about a thousand miles and five centuries out there and that's the real problem with just reading things out to support your arguments without really understanding them so anyway after basically just straight-up reading John globs work out when he gets to the section on women's rights Stephan picks that point to be like oh well this is just a quote here I'm quoting someone else it's just food for thought not my opinion you know he's trying to fly the anti woman part of the argument under the radar there so what does the fan himself actually think about women and this is taken from his video entitled the matriarchal lineage of corruption women who choose the [ __ ] will [ __ ] end this race they will [ __ ] end this human race if we don't start holding them a [ __ ] countable women who choose [ __ ] guarantee child abuse women who choose [ __ ] guarantee criminality sociopathy politicians all the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married [ __ ] and I don't know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing [ __ ] if [ __ ] wasn't a great reproductive strategy it would have been gone long ago keep that black bastard flame alive they cut their hands around it they protect it with their bodies they keep the evil of the species going by continually choosing these guys if being an [ __ ] didn't get women there would be no [ __ ] left if women chose nice guys over [ __ ] we would have a glorious and peaceful world in one generation so women are the root of all evil and will end the human race apparently and I have a question but why is everything so cataclysmic with these alright people you know women won't go out with quote nice guys so the human race is facing annihilation apparently why does every problem have to be an extinction-level event I saw some guy recently say that black lives matter will end Western civilization yeah black lives matter you know we survived the Napoleonic Wars and the breakup of the empires and the rise of Nazism you know some black people who are annoyed about police shooting at them well that's game over for Western civilization anyway with regards to Rome Stefan does think women are somewhat responsible for the fall of the city because they just weren't having enough babies you see and there's strong evidence of a steady decline in population across the entire empire from the 2nd century CE Eon and by the 576 thousand people left in Rome by a thousand and why this fairly drastic reduction in population occurred well nobody knows for sure though sort of luxurious lifestyle and the fact that a lot of women became less interested in producing and raising children and certainly played some part in that so then the depopulation of the city of Rome Stefan says no one knows for sure why it happened which isn't true but that loosening of women's morality played a part so Stefan quotes the low population of the city of Rome by the time of the 500 and now I'd say that as well as the aforementioned plagues at the sack of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths and the sack of Rome in 455 by the Vandals probably had more to do with the population decline than the lifestyles of the Roman women but the real truth here is that the importance of the city of Rome had been waning for a very long time before that Stefan doesn't mention it here but by the time Rome was sacked by the Visigoths it wasn't the capital of the western empire anymore and it hadn't been the capital for at least a hundred years in 286 Diocletian moved the capital from Rome to Milan and it was later moved to Ravenna and it's the fall of Ravenna in 476 that is typically marked by historians as the end of the Western Roman Empire Stefan really seems threw off the blinders on when it comes to women's rights let's take a look at another time he quotes a source talking about women so by the late Republic a rich wife who could divorce and take her wealth with her had real threat against her husband and could wield influence over him this increasing female power manifested in escalating sexual promiscuity and Daltry and guess the modern equivalent would be I'm going to drag you through the family court system and that's how I'm going to have power over you and so I'm going to be more bullying and one historian wrote Roman men deplored the fact that these rich women were more concerned with their own figures and luxuries than with their families unlike the good old time matrons according to the historian Tacitus around a hundred seee these modern women did not spend time with their children and did not nurse their infants but left them to slave wet nurses furthermore children were handed over to be raised by child minders usually the most useless slaves of the household now I worked in a daycare and there are some nice people there but a lot of the mechana like minimum wage people and so on they would be the least economically productive or valuable people to have raise your children so that quote there is from family values in ancient Rome by Richard Salah and it's some excellent selective quoting by Stephan now first of all all this text on the screen right here K from the article by Richard Sallis so I don't know why Stephan singles out the last section by saying one historian wrote and put in quotation marks around it because that one historian also wrote all of these sections as well but whatever Stefan's motivation for doing that if we read this article by Salah in its entirety we see what Stephan chose to leave out and the two sentences preceding Stefan's quotes here read as follows the Romans had their own evolutionary story about family mores and it had nothing to do with the invention of affection which they took to be natural and eternal in the family however their story did contain elements of the decline of paternal Authority and the stable family emphasis on the words store either and then sala goes on to write everything that's the fan quotes in this video now it's clear that Sal is presenting what roman offers for the family values in ancient rome not what those family values actually were and this has made all the more obvious when later salla goes on to write what is interesting about these earliest latin offers is that they are already deploring the moral decline of their own time in short the earliest latin offers were already writing of the breakdown of the good orderly family in which the Pater familias maintained authority over his wife and children if there was ever a better age before the decline it must have been in the prehistoric era an alternative interpretation one that I leaned towards is that the Golden Age before the moral decline never existed in reality but was a later invention by Roman authors who certainly had no reliable historical evidence from moral trends that is to say the narrative of moral decline of the family was based on a historical Mirage of a better past and it was no more than a mirage so then a question what is it with these alright guys and not reading their own sources I'd say about half the time I go and check a source it says the opposite of what they say it does and I really can't tell to what degree they're willfully misrepresenting the sources here you know I don't know if it's scarier if they know they're lying or if they think they're telling the truth it's either incompetence or malice and I can't tell which so thoughts in the comments please now Stefan does mention at least one form of moral decline that doesn't have anything to do with women let's take a look and Greece in its own decline just collapsed or decayed I guess you could say into a pretty lawless and disreputable nation and then they were conquered by the Romans 146 BC because they had decayed and had become selfish and had become lazy and become ridiculously self-critical at the same time as there was these ridiculously high levels of hedonism and they then were conquered from outside and this is grim cycle which we'll talk more in just a moment it was um it was a very decadent and brutal Society right the the Colosseum would get so soaked with blood during the battles in there the gladiatorial battles that they would shovel new sand on the blood hoping to soak it up so it wasn't too unstable for the next round of Fighters 383 ad captive barbarians were being fed to wild animals in the Colosseum and that is not good so that's Rome's moral decay as represented by the violence of the Colosseum and there's two main problems with this picture the first is that Rome had been doing horrible things to people in arenas for centuries before the dates the fan mentioned we can look at Suetonius talking about Caligula who was only the third emperor of Rome feeding prisoners to wild beasts without a trial now Christians particularly during the times when Christianity was persecuted in the Empire didn't much like the practice of people being fed to animals in arenas for obvious reasons and that matters because in the early fourth century Emperor Constantine came to power and he was the first Christian Emperor and a relevant law of Constantine's is quoted in the Codex feodosia eNOS which was a fifth century compilation of all the edicts and laws issued on the Christian Emperor's and I quote bloody spectacles are not suitable for civil ease and domestic quiet where since we have prescribed gladiators those who have been accustomed to be sentenced to such work as punishment for their crimes you should cause the serve in the mines so that they may be punished without shedding their blood Constantine Augustus now not that this actually put an immediate stop to gladiatorial combat or anything but the more violent arena events did generally decline under a succession of Christian Emperor's coinciding oddly enough with the latter days of the Western Empire and if I were to play devil's advocate here I could say that these reformers trying to bang gladiator fights were an early example of liberal PC social justice types who is so pathologically altruistic that they were willing to undermine the centuries-old masculine tradition of gladiatorial combat the decline if the arena shows an erosion of masculine Roman culture right before the fall of the Empire blah blah blah and that's the ideologues approach to history right there it doesn't matter what actually happened just spin it to support your position regardless and one more point on moral decay here there's a Roman legend of the first generation of Romans called the kidnapping of the say by an women and as the Romans tell it the first generation of Romans were mostly men and they didn't have enough women to establish enough families so what they did was they announced a huge festival and invited people from all the nearby towns to attend and then a signal from Romulus the Romans grabbed all the women fought off the men and ran away and that's a classic comic caper right there but absolutely horrific if you actually think through any of the particulars so why am I telling you about the kidnapping of the sabien women well my point here is that the early Romans weren't always moral and virtuous if morality has one constant throughout history it's that the preceding generation fused the next generation as the worst most immoral law yet but that doesn't make it true so let's talk about something a little more concrete than concepts of myrrh reality and virtue now this is the mind-blowing aspect of it just just put this into your koja tater and take it for a hamster wheel spin for all of this piece all of this amazing public infrastructure or these roads the astonishing roads that were really the backbone of the army strength the the legal system they be these soldiers the the courts everything for all of this the ordinary Roman citizen worked for only two days a year to pay his taxes let me say it again brothers and sisters the ordinary Roman citizen worked for only two days a year to pay his taxes okay a little bit more at the end which we'll get to but just think of that just think of it so then the average Roman citizen paid his taxes by working only two days a year and man I hunted this sauce all over the internet but I found it eventually a Fink an American historian called J Rufus fears put out an audio book called history of freedom and the two days a year thing comes from chapter 9 called freedom in the Roman Empire and I think it was from here that's the fan got it because all of Stefan's all the points in this section also come from this chapter of fears audio book the Roman Empire of Titus stretched from the Isle of Britain all the way out to the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley's of Iraq today and from the North Sea to the sands of the Sahara we remember the case of st. Paul when he is arrested and about to be beaten by a Tribune he says you cannot beat me it is against my rights as a Roman citizen and the Tribune says I don't believe you Paul pulls out his papers how did you get to be a Roman citizen I had to pay a bribe to get one because for this wealth and prosperity this protection by a superb army for this infrastructure of roads the ordinary Roman works two days a year to pay his taxes now Jay Rufus fears declines the show is working here so I can't actually be sure how he arrived at two days a year and from listening to his audiobook fears also has a very clear modern political bias so I wouldn't be surprised if he was fudging the numbers a little bit to be honest but I don't know now there is a book in the reading list that came with the audiobook that contains the two days worth of tax fing and that's entitled preparing America's foreign policy for the 21st century and that's a collection of talks and discussions held at the University of Oklahoma in 1999 by a buncha professor's and foreign policy experts and the two days quotes is in a section called the Roman experience commentary and discussion and that chapter is offered by J Rufus spheres now if this book's intended as a source then that's quite funny to be honest I like the audacity of just quoting yourself but it might not be meant to be a source I don't know it might just be an instance of the professor put in his own book on the reading list you know anyway just for the sake of this argument I'm going to assume that the two days a year thing is true so okay the average Roman citizen pays his taxes in just two days of work well the first thing to note here is the phrase average citizen is not the same as average inhabitant the Roman understanding of the word citizen is not the same as ours not everyone in the Empire was a citizen Rome was a slave state for starters and slaves were considered property not citizens actually before the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD pretty much only free Roman man born on the Italian peninsula were considered full citizens inhabitants of the other provinces of the Empire were not full citizens and this is significant because Italy itself was largely exempt from taxation until diocletian's tax reforms into 90 AD so to be a full Roman citizen before both the Edict of Caracalla and diocletian's reforms means that you're not likely to be paying taxes anyway and so we have to ask what period of time is Stefan talking about Stefan says taxes were paid in two days of work except for an increase near the end of the empire and wouldn't that be narrative ly convenient well the section of phears audio book the quote comes from is talking about an average day in the life of a citizen of pompeii and pompeii was destroyed in 79 AD so we're necessarily talking earlier than that relatively early Empire and long before the Edict of Caracalla meaning most full Roman citizens at this point we're exempt from most taxes so it's not surprising they were quite low to be honest and I'm very interested if Stefan thinks this system would work today imagine President Trump comes to office and he says ok everyone all American citizens are now exempt from taxation except from now on only white men who were born here counts as citizens and also we're bringing slavery back and by the way I've just declared war on Canada so that we can go and steal all of their things and get more slaves I imagine that be somewhat of a mixed reaction also I'm reminded of Stefan talking about the grain dole now the expansion of the dole of the welfare state drove steep rises in Roman taxes but how does this work in Stefan's world I mean the grain dole was brought in before Pompey was destroyed and it didn't go away or anything the grain dole was around throughout this whole period so Stefan at one point makes it seem like the citizens of Rome were struggling under the heavy tax burden of paying for the welfare of all the lazy scrounges while at another point making it seem like the Romans were paying almost no taxes and enjoying economic freedom and growth you know which is it can't be both and I'd like now to consider one point in Stefan's video where he either ignores or just fails to mention a contradiction in his argument even when it's staring him right in the face Octavian took the name or gaseous and became the first emperor of Rome ruling from 27 BC to 14 ad now this did shrink some political freedom you know he's an emperor but it did lead to an expansion of economic freedoms our gas stirs did favor private enterprise private property and free trade so that's that's good for merchants at least and for the general population who care more about bread than votes so under or gaseous taxes were lowered significantly he abolished tax farming which was this practice of just saying to people go get me a bunch of taxes and if you can't get them you have to pay me anyway and he regulated taxation as a whole so Trump --is-- he could be made the case so Stefan says that August's favored private enterprise and free trade but then he immediately gives an example of August's doing something which could very much be seen as the opposite of those things so tax farming was the way that Rome collected taxes on tale or justices reforms and what would happen is the state would auction off the rights to tax particular areas to private individuals and then that private individual would be responsible for taxing the area and as you might imagine it tended to be abused by people looking to maximize profit and August's abolished this practice and regulated the tax system which resulted as Stefan points out in lower taxes so could one now argue that this is an example of the state interfering with and imposing restrictions on the free market August's abolished the right to trade tax farming rights and brought tax under the regulation of the state so couldn't it be said that it was the free market that led to the unfairly high taxes and the state bureaucracy that lowered them a point of comparison here is Augustus's creation of an institutionalized police force and fire brigade before august's Rome's fire brigades were owned privately and this is a bust of Marcus Licinius Crassus which is a hell of a name to say if you have a lisp who was the owner of such a privatized fire brigade and not so coincidentally one of the richest men in human history you see when there was a fire in Rome Crassus would have his fire brigade turn up and then do nothing while Crassus argued prices with the owner of the burning property and if they didn't agree to pay grasses what he wanted he just leave and take his fire brigade with him and that's obviously not a very reliable or safe system of firefighting and so august's instituted a public fire brigade and he actually levied a new tax on the sale of slaves in order to set it up what a tax-and-spend anti-free market socialist one might say also while we're looking up this section of Stefan's video let's just for a laugh check out this source here the historian Oertel wrote in 1934 quote the victory of August's and of the West meant a repulse of the tendencies towards state capitalism and state socialism which might have come to fruition had Anthony and Cleopatra been victorious right so in that war if the central planning of Egypt had spread to Rome it would have been a disaster and it didn't spread the other way because Rome was the sorry Egypt was like the basket case for the Roman grain so first off as we know by now the importation of post-industrial revolution ideas like socialism and capitalism into the ancient world is misleading and annoying but let's check out this hurtle guy so Stefan is quoting here from a Cato Institute article called how excessive government killed ancient Rome and a more cynical man than me might suspect that an article by a libertarian think-tank talking about the evils of excessive government might just be a tiny bit biased but far-fetched speculation aside the article includes two sources for its quotes by Oh Ethel and that's chapter 10 and chapter 12 of the Cambridge ancient history published in 1934 and 1939 and when I saw that I for oh that's quite a long time ago I wonder if there are more recent additions of those books and would you believe it yes there are but I just want a detour a little before we get to those a mention Michael Rostov Seth better said that wrong who it's another historian quoted by both the Cato Institute and staff an and he's someone else who compared his contemporary political situation to ancient Rome and funnily enough whose Wikipedia article says rostov Zeff used terms such as proletariat bourgeoisie in capitalism freely in his work and the importation of those terms into a description of the ancient world where they did not necessarily apply caused criticism so then do you have those two names right so let's look at the updated version of Cambridge ancient history and firstly the newer edition of volume 10 published in 1996 says it is probably true that there is no period in Roman history on which the views of modern scholars have been more radically transformed in the last six decades it's therefore appropriate to indicate briefly in what respects this volume differs most significantly etc you get the point the volume has been heavily revised and it goes on to outline the reasons for the changes in perspective and then the revisions themselves and one of these revisions was to just drop our contribution entirely saying basically that it was interesting in its day but it no longer holds up now then the new edition of volume 12 and this volume is openly critical of both rostov Zef and oils tactic of comparing contemporary politics to the ancient world and here's a quote taken from the introduction to the section where it first mentions Oh Ethel in a rather loose way modern bourgeois ideology bourgeois bourgeois I can never say that ideology has fought it possible to identify the present-day bourgeoisie with the Kyary alleys and has taken up their cause against the despotism of a totalitarian Imperial state this is a singularly anachronistic projection of contemporary realities so what's my point here well the Cato Institute and by proxy Stefan are selectively quoting older editions of the Cambridge ancient history from the 1930s and ignoring the more recent editions that take a contrary and critical view of those earlier editions but hey I guess if you want to stop the wheel of history you also have to stop historical research let's look at one of the times that rostov Zeff shows up in Stefan's video and I'm going to show you two clips now both concerning historian Edward Gibbon Gibbon one of the famous historians who really knew the history of Roman you know turned his hands into a thrilling Claus writing all this stuff out he wrote once he said that if a person were to pick the one period in the history of the human race when mankind was happiest he would without hesitation choose that period of the second century AD when Rome was stable when peace reigned and trade reigned throughout the Empire trade was constantly rising and falling as empires Rozin for and that is really really astonishing to think about Michael rust of SEFs has described this as a period of quote almost complete freedom for trade and have splendid opportunities for private initiative and this is one of the reasons why earlier given said this was some of the best places to live ever two days a year pay your taxes 5% on customs duties which means locally produced goods there's no tax no duties no nothing at all and it's just astounding so firstly this quote of rostov serfs is specifically talking about the reign of Augustus and his immediate successors the time Gibbon identified as the best time to live was under the reign of the so called five good Emperor's which was a century later so let's read Gibbons actual quote if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus the vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power under the guidance of virtue and with and he goes on to mention the civil administration and the laws and the relative peace know we're here does Gibbon say anything about free trade or the economy or anything but he does mention the absolute power wielded by the state as a positive which I wouldn't think Stefan would be too keen on to be perfectly honest so I'd like to wrap up my video by responding to a few key moments from Stefan's conclusion to his video and the last thing that I want to say is that people complain I mentioned this at the beginning of people complain they say well nobody learns anything from history what's like because nobody tells the truth of that history so what has happened is the history of the West in particular the the glories the triumphs and the disastrous the full span at the Shakespearean span of Western history has been replaced by vituperative calumny and nagging your ancestors were bad your ancestors would mean there was sexist they would patriarchs they were racist they were homophobes they were bad bad bad colonialism was just terrible terrible terrible they slaughtered all the natives at all right the truth is that the West has bought by far the greatest values to the world the values of science the values of reasons values of the free market the values of modern medicine the values of capitalism you are the offspring and the descendants of many heroes of many brave souls who fought very hard to bring and extend the freedoms you now enjoy if you feel that you are descended from evil you have nothing in your civilised civilization to defend you are children of heroes and only heroes get to keep their freedoms oh stuff so included there is stephane saying that nobody tells the truth about history but what is the truth about history according to him truth for Molyneux appears to be whatever historical facts conform to his narrative and everything else is just to quote him interminable engagement in intellectual debate Stephon also says that unless you think you're descended from heroes you have nothing to defend about your civilization and that's just not true I don't think I'm descended from heroes and how fully it met all the horrible things my societies done in the past but I'm still proud of things about my society you know specifically here that I have the freedom to admit that my society's done those awful things the things I want to defend about my society are all the things that stefan molyneux would take away if he had the chance you know the fall of Western civilization for me would be the reinstitution of slavery the taken away of women's rights and things like that I don't like this ultra-nationalist idea where you have to ignore all the bad things your culture or race has ever done you know what the stephane think happened to the Native American societies I don't know I guess their taxes must have been too high or something oh god no I'm not doing it I'm not watching it I'm all molyneux doubt for a good six months at least if you enjoyed this interminable intellectual debate please like and subscribe I know what they do now I think I've also got a donation link on the YouTube banner there if you're feeling particularly generous and I've had quite a few donations of some very lovely people whose names I won't read out because I don't know if they want me to to be honest but you know who you are and you are very much appreciated also if you'd like me to take a look at any specific video hit me up on either Twitter or ask fm and there will be links to those in the description and look at me doing the proper YouTube or ending to the video rather than just cutting away and I'm learning next I have to figure out motion graphics

Channel: Shaun

Views: 1,190,671

Rating: 4.7527676 out of 5

Keywords: shaun jen, stefan molyneux, the fall of rome, the truth about the fall of rome

Id: BHW3Y_p2llo

Length: 55min 28sec (3328 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/RedErin]

Shawn destroyed the killstream in this debate.

[u/oseas000]

In the early years of rome, rome took in brigands, criminals, and whoever the fucks and integrated them as citizens. At that era tribes wasnt even united under the italian culture group, and there were also greek colonies that influenced roman culture giving birth to rome’s democratic ways.

Edit: here is my favorite roman history vid

[u/roma4356]

Anyone who has a understanding of history would kill themselves in a video game if the watched the video by stefan. The video by Stefan would be considered historical malpractice and you'd be shunned by the historian community. I appreciate the response video.

[u/ReddishCat]

Isn't there a historian that lived in Roman Britannia. That randomly name drops Ethopian to describe a soldier stationed at the Hadrian wall.

Archaeologist also found Moorse cooking pods in England. and graves written in Syrian characters.

It makes sense too. You recruit soldiers in Africa and station them to Britannia. and the soldiers you recruit in Britannia you send to Africa.

[u/obergone]

Well actually the byzantin empire was defeated by the Ottomans aka muslims aka mutliculturalism nathanPEPE

[u/Iliehalfthetime]

What about Texas after its independence? Did it fall apart because there were white texans and brown texans?

[u/knigpin]

You may only post in this thread if Trajan is your true emperorfu

Caesar lovers OUT OUT OUT

[u/TheSpecialsit05]

Wasn’t one of the reasons Rome fell was because of their overexpansive empire and failing to collect taxes from the wealthy at the time? I could be wrong I haven’t brushed up on my Roman history in a while.