If you wake up one day and notice your soul has been robbed, it’s probably in Jeff Monson’s back pocket — and you can’t do anything about it. Visually, Monson looks like he was assembled from the absolute worst parts of little kid’s nightmares and then wrapped in a blanket of tattoos. So when I tell you he’s a self-proclaimed ‘anarchist’, it shouldn’t even surprise you. If I told you he was an avid sock knitter — that’s surprising. In fact, if Jeff Monson knitted socks they would come with little packs of thermite knitted inside so that when you kicked someone’s ass, everything around that person’s ass would explode in a mushroom cloud of amazing. Check out this interview with the new ISKA heavyweight world champion, Jeff Monson, transcribed by Elena Lopez — only at MiddleEasy.com.
People ask me, what do you think you are and what I feel society should be like? And I put it back on them and I ask what they feel I think society should be like? And it’s funny because the things that people say are the same things that an anarchist society is. We have Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I have nothing against Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it’s a joke that he’s the Governor. What, people can’t build a road or a hospital or have health care without a bodybuilder/former actor telling you to do so? We’re just brainwashed into thinking that we need people to do things for us. Part of it is that and part of it is that we just want to have someone else in control and not have to worry about things, but we lose control of our own lives. It’s one of those things like on the Matrix when they ask do you want to take the red pill? And that happens to me. I met a professor one day in a community psychology class and he was talking about community programs and half way houses and the government and all this stuff. I talked with him afterwards and I met with him for lunch and he wasn’t an anarchist or anything, but opened my eyes up. He made me want to learn more and I went out and read a lot in magazines and books and then I got into MMA and I was able to travel and I saw just gross economic disparity and some of the saddest things ever. I don’t think it’s far to say, kind of like the butterfly effect, how they say that money is the root of all evil. I think capitalism is in the world.
If you talk about the sex slave trade, the ENRON thing, everything is economically based. People are trying to survive and people are trying to get ahead using capitalism. Then you have people in other countries like Africa trying to survive all these wars that are going on and conflicts and resources and it’s all the same thing because we’re living in an economic system where having a bunch of cars and a boat and a big house is seen as, even though you’re exploiting people to get to that point, it’s seen as a good thing. Imagine being the parent of a kid, a six-year-old or a five-year-old in kindergarten and they go to recess everyday and get their lunch money taken away by a bully who says I won’t let you play with these toys unless you give me your lunch or your lunch money because he’s a bully and that’s horrible. But that’s what we have, that’s what our society is based on. If you were the parent of the bully or the bullied you would go ballistic, but if you exploit people now and charge too much or over work your workers and create all these opportunities for yourself at the expense of others and you benefit economically because of it your seen as a great success story very admired. But we know better then that, and it’s kind of crazy.
Everybody in the United States right now, except for the Native Americans, are all immigrants. This is another thing about being brainwashed, we’re born on this earth and this country has it’s red, white and blue flag and all the politicians make statements or laws saying you can’t go here or there. Why can’t I walk from this place to this place? We have had our corporations going into Mexico for years and years, tire factories and auto factories and we piss on their environment, we have no environmental laws or age requirements or hours worked or workers rights or anything. We go in there and basically these areas build up and as soon as they leave and go to China or India where it’s even cheaper to produce things and they leave all these people jobless and homeless and everything else and then we wonder why they want to come to the United States.
These countries like Haiti and Mexico and Guatemala and Nicaragua, these countries are places that we have had our corporations, sugar plantations, fruit companies, auto manufacturers or whatever. And then we go and create opportunities for our business men in these places and then they leave or they stay there and the people are taken advantage of and then we wonder why they want to come to the United States. They just want to escape the bad reality that we set for them. Bolivia is a perfect example. Bolivia, they have fossil bones from twelve thousand years ago, so people are coming over from Asia on the Bering Straight to Bolivia twelve thousand years ago, so that’s how long the indigenous people have been there. They own 20% of their own country and 80% is owned by mining companies that are not from Bolivia, but from the United States, England, Dutch companies. So if you were born in Bolivia right now 80% of that land you can’t even walk on. The countries that own these mining companies aren’t even Bolivian. How crazy is that? They hire these people, indigenous people to work for nothing and to live in shacks and of course there are not any environmental laws and they rape the land and then they leave when they are done and it’s inhabitable. That’s exactly what happened to Haiti and that’s why it’s inhabitable right now.
Because it’s a union that it’s leadership is not based on a hierarchy, which means that the president of the union, the director, the member, there’s no difference, there’s no rank. It’s a union that tries to do away with all institutions of inequality. A lot of it is on a smaller scale like they fired three workers at a small pizza place because they protested the fact that they weren’t getting overtime, so they fired them and hired someone else. So they had a protest and they’re looking out for everyone no matter what your status, so it’s very much based on anarchist principles and people don’t even realize that it is. This isn’t anarchist, but you know FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt) had polio and this is the President of the United States and voted one of the better presidents that we’ve had. And after one of his Fireside Chats, they were all on the radio because he didn’t want people to him in a wheelchair on TV. But one of them after the chat he did make a TV appearance sitting behind a desk and he talked about a new constitution and this is the president of the United States. He said I want this for the constitution and this is what I envisioned and this is what I want for the people of the United States. He said I want a job for everybody, I want health care for everybody, I want a secondary education for everybody who wants it. I want transportation and housing and the bare essentials of food for everybody who is willing to work. And some sixty years later we because of special interest groups and corporations and money and people having their hands in our law makers pockets we can’t even get health care.
We are the only western industrialized nation without guaranteed health care for its citizens and we’re the richest country int the world and it’s unbelievable. Obama’s in the office right now with good ideas, but you can’t get anything done because the public doesn’t want it, they’re not going to agree to anything, they’re going to fight him and blame him for everything. He can’t even get health care passed that will guarantee health care for the poorest of the poor. At that point when your looking at that and the special interest groups you have to overthrow the system, there is no fixing it. This politician and that politician, you have what I think in my opinion, is a good man (Obama), fighting a system that is irrevocably broken. So, you have to change the system, and I talk about a political revolution, the public that’s coming in, the democrats, or even the Libertarians need to overthrow the system, because the system is broken. The law makers don’t write the laws, the corporations write them, and the law makers with the money of these guys who write our laws. The senators’ have 4 or 5 houses, and their salary is only like $150,000-170,000 a year, which is a good salary but it’s not crazy. Where does all this money come from? It’s from getting, kickbacks. We’ll give you $500,000 if you introduce this law or address this bill, to try to get passed and get (this many) people to agree with it. Then the senators’ owe them, and look after themselves. Then we vote for them time and time again, and then we complain about it (whoever is in the office we complain). I think if you vote, and you want to give someone else power over you.
I would never vote, and I suggest we don’t. I don’t think these people have any authority over us at all, why does this person have authority because they’re a lawmaker?
Basically, because we let them.
Someone with a gun is saying they have power, but they have no power. A police officer, a governor, or the president even. You know he’s a man I’m a man, why can he tell me what to do? I’m not hurting anyone else, I’m not taking someone’s home, or physically harming someone. How can they come and tell me you need to do this, and you need to write this, file this, adhere to this law, not cross this border, get this stamp? How can they tell me what I can and can’t do? I don’t agree with any of that. Why should I? Why should anybody? People put in power by themselves, you vote for the president, and you have 3 or 4 choices, you can go all super rich lawyers or super super rich, they pick up their money. They’re handpicked to go there, by corporations. There’s no way the general Joe Schmo’ like me could ever be that. If you open the paper, there’s a political cartoon always making fun of some decision they made, or the fact that some drug company, or ENRON is making billions. It’s unimaginable for it to be legal to take kickbacks, it’s not even an illegal thing to take kickbacks from these companies that write our law. Special interest groups keep saying do this, introduce this bill, put this in there, grab this and take this away. Our whole legal system is built on that. That’s just the way it is, we’re supposed to live by it. You know, you’re not a patriot or a true American. We’re all just brainwashed. To me, I’m not just being egotistical. It’s not even my opinion, it’s just a thing that’s right or wrong. Is it right to go kill that person across the street that you meet? Of course not, to me it’s that black and white how right or wrong something is. I mean to go back to the point is that these people are the one’s telling us what to do, that are completely unethical, completely hypocritical, and they want to tell me that I need to register my car, and I need to pay this much, and that I need to have this. Reading my license and get a report. It’s like, who are you to tell me anything?
Well that’s a good question and there’s a couple points. First of all, like I was saying earlier, almost all crime is economically based, and I mean this from the very beginning.
Let’s say someone murders someone, and they weren’t robbed just murdered. What happened to that kid growing up? Did he have both parents at home or were both parents working, because they couldn’t make a living? It goes on and on and on, maybe he couldn’t go to college because his grades weren’t good enough, or he didn’t have good parenting? Most crime is driven by economics, and most things are to tied to it in some way. Parents might not be able to stay home with their kids, or maybe not have the advantages or the education that they want. How many people do what they want to do? What would you want to do for your job? How many people say, I want to be a (bank teller?) or a receptionist? Hardly any of them, because they need you to get by. Well like me, I got lucky and blessed to be able to get a job that I liked. But, most people don’t do what they want to do, so it’s your opportunity to do what you want to do, and get an education. And you don’t have to worry about covering expenses, or making a living while you did it. You could study hard, and become what you wanted to do, and the job you wanted. You didn’t have to worry about getting evicted, or your car taken away, or something like that. And you had time, and there were daycare centers, and community places that you didn’t have to worry about both of your parents staying at home. You could stay at home with your kid if you wanted, and there’s good places that had your kids, and everything was community based, and based on society. You know, how much crime would we really have? If you had a place to live, a vehicle, you didn’t have to worry about bills, and things being taken away from you, and you had a job that you wanted. What kind of crime would there be?
Let’s say that there are crimes, if society comes in a whole, and you live in a community where someones is robbing, just say look, you’re not welcome here, if you want to live with us then these are the rules that we agree on as people. Everything else people can make themselves, like I said you have a hospital, you have roads, and people know how to build those things on their own. You see capitalism as worse, we have a crisis, you see the best things out of people, and then you see the worst, like the tsunami in Japan. By the way, I was thinking about that and I’m not really a conspiracy theorist, and I don’t think something happened like that. It’s right on the Pacific rim, and they have earthquakes all the time, that whole rim up to Washington is right on that Pacific rim. The volcanoes come up, and the islands form there. But anyway, I think crime wouldn’t be so much of a consideration, and the people themselves can make the choices and do the things they want to do without being told, but like I said, we’re just brainwashed into thinking that we need someone to do it for us. But these are the same people that are stealing from us, the same people that take our taxes away, that raise prices on stuff. Anyway I was talking about the crisis, the tsunami in Japan. As soon as you have a problem like that, you see them selling water for like $10 a bottle. People will exploit other people, like oh my gosh here’s my golden opportunity.
You saw that in New Orleans, you saw the best of these people helping out, people volunteering, and doing whatever they can for housing people, and giving them water, and a lot of people gave out free gas. And then on the other end, you see people totally exploiting the situation, charging a stupid amount of money because people payed them. As human beings, I think we’re above that morally and ethically, we should be above taking advantage of people. We are social creatures, people make arguments about isn’t it the law, and everyone is trying to fight for themselves, like only the strong survive and survival of the fittest. I think yeah to a certain extent, but we are social creatures, when we were back as cavemen, and living in trees, if you were like you go on your own guys’, I’m going to go kill my own woolly mammoth, and make my own fire, you would die, you needed help you had to work together. We lost that somewhere, and now every one’s out from themselves, and it seems like they put down Obama. It’s like the old McCarthy thing where Communism was seen as a bad thing, What is wrong with doing something with someone else, or having a society based on people instead of competition. I love competition, I mean my job is competition. The competition should be from people playing chess, or from people fighting in the octagon, or people playing on the baseball field, that’s were you want to compete go compete all you want. Why do I have to compete with my neighbor for a job, for food, for school, or for daycare. For something like this, why are we fighting each other for the basics of life? It’s crazy, everything that these people do, to a couple of them it’s a virus, that’s killing the world. The virus is taking apart the environment as we see it, I mean every year like now with the housing crisis, every year things get worse and worse and worse. now finally because we don’t have money anymore, our standard living in the United States is finally going down, and it’s been continuing to go down. I mean everything is getting cut, parks are getting cut, education is getting cut. I have two kids in high school and they have to pay $110 per sport that they play, because there’s not the funding for it. It’s a choice, I don’t know how many high schools, but 74,000 kids in the troy area are being shuffled to other high schools, because the high schools that they, the middle schools that they shut them down. Because there’s no money to keep them open. These are our kids, and we’re shutting down schools, and packing them in classrooms because it’s not for profit. Everything is for a damn profit, if it’s not for profit, it gets cut. You know they’re talking about tax cuts’ and destroying social programs, and it’s like if we pay taxes, it should all be for us, it should all be for the schools, all for the roads,and the hospitals, for the kids, for health care. All the stuff should be for us, it shouldn’t be for the damn military. You know we’re giving Egypt billions of dollars a year, and Israel billions of dollars a year for their nuclear programs for defense, and we’re giving money for this, and we’re giving kickback, and all our money is getting spent all over the place and we have no idea, and the general public has no idea because we don’t pay attention. And yet we’re bitching about having health care for all of our people. I mean these are the people who we vote for, and these are the people that we go i don’t care I’ll vote this person in, and it’s crazy, all our money should go for us, not for some other military base, or (Jeff’s phone abruptly cuts off, on to next question)
Education would be much easier in an anarchist system, because it would be community based, and you would have schools and everything, but people go what would the motivation be? If I could make a million dollars a year, if I could open up my own business and make this kind of thing, why would I even want to go to school? It’s because, people want to learn, like a lot of good doctors aren’t doctors’ because they make all this money, they’re doctors because they want to help the people, and because they’re intelligent. If you were able to go to school, and have your medical school and all of that paid for if that’s what you chose to do, or not paid for because there would be no cost, as long as you were doing good grades and stuff, a lot of people would still choose to be doctors’. Some people choose to be receptionists or janitor’s, because they didn’t want to go to school, but they would still work and that would be their prerogative, and they wouldn’t have to go to school or whatever like that. But right now, everything is based on funding, you know it’s got to be funded, and who is deciding our funding? The lawmakers who are basically controlled by the corporations, so they’re making the decisions. Now are they going to put in a lot of money on something that doesn’t make any money? No, of course not. So they do the minimal that they have to do. And now we’re talking about thresholds, you know capitalism has established it’s fatal flaw. Everybody now has at least shown it’s not the end at all, it’s not the holy grail. Then people are like what’s the better system than, I’m like what’s a worse system than everybody fighting each other, and the elite controlling everything, and these corporations controlling everything with the lawmakers in their pocket and the things we fight for, you know what is a worse system than that?
You know I think now that capitalism with the housing crisis, people who are hard working people, who have both parents working, and are like OK, I’m calm and then all of a sudden this happening, and people are losing their houses. How bad is that, if you’re willing to work, or you are working and you can’t even survive, or even have a house because you can’t make your payment anymore, or maybe you were laid of work because they were doing all of these layoffs. They said all the companies rebounded in the economic sector as far as these companies, because they basically trim their fat, what they call fat, they cut their payroll, you know they’re reducing the health care that they’re trying to provide to their employees. So, they’re cutting all of these people working there and they’re managing themselves so they’re becoming better, but the general people the people actually working these jobs, they haven’t recovered, in fact it’s worse then it has been in forever. As far as the system, I think education would be much improved because everyone would have access to it.
Right now my son is graduating high school this year and he gets a 4.0 like I’m not exaggerating. I don’t think he has ever had a B in his life, ever, since he has been in the third grade and he is taking all honors classes, taking all these AP courses that he has taken the AP test for and I think he got a 5 which is the highest, the SAT total is 2400 which is the highest you can possibly get and I think he got a 2230 and we are still struggling to find out if he’s going to get into college or not. He got accepted by Cal Berkley and Arizona State, Cornell, University of Washington, University of Minnesota and were seeing if he can get enough scholarships to get it paid for because the cost of tuition for most of these schools is over $20,00.00 per year and some are more then that and the whole total cost is over $30,000.00 every year when you add in room and board, books then the tuition is over $30,000.00 per year. So your looking at $120,000.00 to $250,000.00 over a 4 year period based on the school. And this is a guy who has spent 4 years busting his ass and an intelligent kid and we’re trying to figure out if he can go to one of these schools that he wants to go to and he’s earned it. and that’s ridiculous The grandparents, they both passed away he’s retired military, they both worked 20 years at a brewery and had retirement and social security and both worked well into their 60’s and when they passed away they have a reverse mortgage on a house that they already paid for and a car that had been paid for and no outstanding bills other than health care costs because they had health care needs. They were having to chose which medications to take and which ones they could afford and couldn’t afford and these are two people who worked their asses off their entire lives and they were losing the value of their house that they had already paid off and had to have a reverse mortgage on their house to pay for their medications because they were old. That’s wrong.
No, life doesn’t suck, I’m just really angry at the way things are. My son is going to Arizona State for spring break cause that’s one of the places he got accepted at and we’re looking in to and I have a good friend, Laurie and her husband goes there and she’s an anarchist. It’s funny because we feed off each other like if one of us is down kind of like I am she talks about all these good things and if I am up then I try to bring her up too if she’s down. There are a lot of good things and you don’t want to become one of those people who are just down on everything and the world is bad. I think people are good, but if you put 5 people in a cave and only give enough food for 2 or 3 of them then your going to have some problems and that’s kind of what society has become. Right now the economic system creates problems. If you take someones home away and you take away their means of surviving and you take away their manhood almost because in some cases they can’t provide for their families even though they are willing things get a little grey. But with the right opportunities presented for you people want to help each other, we’re social creatures. They say competition and survival of the fittest and I totally disagree. I think being social creatures like we are is a greater instinct then anything. We’re supposed to be working together and helping one another.
There is this song by U2, I love them and it’s called One and some of the lyrics go “We get to carry one another” and I think that’s really powerful because it doesn’t say we help one another, we carry one another it’s says we get to, we have the opportunity to carry one another or help one another when one of us needs to be carried and I think that’s very powerful. There is nothing greater in the world then to help someone when they need help and then to feel that coming back at you when you need help. My son told me the other day on the phone when we were taking about him going to debate and stuff and having a good time and he said you can’t have the fun, none of this would be possible if you can’t share it with someone. He was saying this because they won the debate and they wanted to go out afterwards and celebrate and he said if he weren’t able to share it with them it wouldn’t have meant anything. That was very powerful in itself because what kind of joy is there if you can’t tell people about it or share about it? When I take my little 9 month old out and she’s cooing at people and smiling at people and that really makes me happy because she is unknowingly spreading all this joy. When I’m on an airplane walking down the aisle I just see all these people smiling. Someone that I would never have any contact with otherwise is being touched by my kid. But that’s how we are, but we get cynical and we don’t want to talk to each other. It’s just like how houses are built. Nobody has a big front porch anymore like how those Midwestern houses are with the chair in the front. Everything is locked and gated and mine, mine, mine with security systems and it doesn’t have to be that way.
Jeff would like to thank JM Lexus for their tremendous support in sponsoring him for this fight, GX Supplements, Supplement Warehouse, Live Colors, Mobink, La Parilla, OTM, ML Management and his managers Tina and Ray, Fight Time Promotions and Karla and Howard Davis, American Top Team Coconut Creek, IHP and all of his coaches and trainers.
