Davis Aurini - Political Theory and the Hierarchy of Truth

Dec. 15, 2013 - Davis Aurini

24:06

Political Theory and the Hierarchy of Truth

Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oe6HUgrRlQ Radish Magazine 3.9 - Anarcho Tyranny: http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/anarcho-tyranny/ Music: Symphony No. 3 for Soprano and Orchestra, "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" (1976): I. Lento - Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile by Henryk Górecki My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/

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	We live in an age of materialistic philosophy.
	Now, materialism is fine all on its own.
	The problem is, it forgot where it came from.
	It assumes a complete understanding of the nature of reality and our existence here on the earth.
	But when you start to scratch the surface of materialism, you discover a paradox.
	This is a paradox that religions have tried to encapsulate throughout the eras.
	Taoism, that which can be written down is not the true Tao.
	Christianity, if you want to save your life, give up your life.
	And if you try and hold on to your life, you will lose it.
	This is a contradiction that we find, not just in philosophy, not just in our own lives, but in the very foundational premises of the scientific method, of mathematics itself, that goes to undermine this materialism.
	But this materialistic philosophy sees these explanations of its limitations and assumes them to be nonsense because they don't fit into the materialistic worldview.
	Now this, of course, has very dire and very extreme political implications, but before we can get to that, we need to discuss the hierarchy of truth.
	Truth comes in three basic levels.
	The absolute truth, the objective truth, and the relative truth.
	The relative truth is the easiest one for us to understand.
	And of course materialism makes fun of it more than it should.
	The relative truth is what's true for you.
	How things make you feel, your preferences, your tastes, the reality of the moment, how you respond to things.
	That's the relative truth.
	And the problem is that if you descend to the level of relative truth, you become a response to your environment.
	You become nothing more than an object.
	You are objectified by not having any higher truth with inside of you.
	The next level is objective truth.
	Now this is where we find materialism.
	This is the scientific method.
	This is 2 plus 2 equals 4.
	These are facts and figures, the world that we can see and measure out there.
	These are laws, these are things written down in books.
	This is the objective truth.
	And unfortunately, this is where most people stop nowadays.
	We have a lot of stuff clinging on to the objective truth, but not going any higher.
	The absolute truth is the reality underlying everything else.
	And you can't discover it using the methods of objective truth.
	It is the reason behind mathematics that mathematics can't discover.
	It's the firmament that is necessary for anything else to exist.
	And it is a moral decision, a leap of faith, to believe in the absolute truth.
	The problem is, the reason that you need to make this leap of faith is because if you don't, it doesn't matter how strongly you believe in the objective truth, eventually it crumbles into the relative truth, and you become nothing more than an object.
	This is the fundamental debate going on in politics for the past 300 years, and we are seeing the long-term effects of it.
	But it would help if I actually started putting the wheels on the road.
	Let's bring this down, let's bring this into everyday human experiences.
	And in fact, the best place to start is the video that started this whole train of thought in my head.
	It's a TED Talk called Atheism 2.0 by Alain de Boton.
	Assuming he uses the original pronunciation of his name, it might be Alan.
	And I'll link to it below.
	There's actually quite a bit of interesting stuff in there, but I'm going to focus on one aspect.
	So in Atheism 2.0, De Boton argues that, yes, we've all figured out that there isn't a God.
	We've all figured out it's silly.
	Obviously it's not true, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
	He argues that there is quite a bit of stuff in religion that atheists would like to have.
	For instance, the wedding ceremonies, the sense of community, the moral teachings.
	This is all good stuff.
	So why don't we get rid of the God part and just keep whatever parts we like?
	Why don't we pick and choose which parts of the religion we like and keep those?
	You're seeing the flaw in this sort of reasoning.
	Now, regardless of the truth of religion, the vast majority of religions have been around for quite some time, and the social prescriptions that they lay down create a coherent and stable society.
	Your mileage may vary.
	Some are more stable than others.
	Some are more stifling than others.
	But the simple fact of the matter is that all of these tenets, all of these bits in the holy book that sound like nonsense upon first reading, if you don't actually study some theology and the context into which you're supposed to be interpreting all this stuff, it might seem like nonsense upon first view.
	But this is all part of a memeplex.
	All of these parts are there for a reason.
	And the reason doesn't quite make sense at first glance.
	And it's the Godhead, the absolute truth.
	You follow all these religious rules not because they give you a stable society, but because God said so.
	And so now, what happens when we approach it saying that we just want a stable society?
	We're going to pick and choose which parts of the religion that we follow.
	So, at the beginning, you take a couple of the silly rules that don't seem to make much sense, and you toss those out, but you keep the rest.
	You keep the important parts.
	You got most of the religion left, don't you?
	Until one more rule becomes a little bit inconvenient.
	So, okay, okay, we're done with that one.
	And then another rule.
	And another rule.
	Until, eventually, you tried to have this objective religion, this objective truth of these delineated moral rules you will follow.
	But one by one, they had to be written out.
	Or modified.
	Or bit by bit, this coherent system of moral rules, because it has no higher reason for existing.
	There's no God anymore in this religion.
	One by one, they disappear, and you're down to relative truth.
	Quite frankly, look at the social degeneration of the past 50 years in our civilization.
	So, the hippies, the baby boomers, summer of 1969, they take all of that unnecessary wood in civilization, all those fences that didn't seem to quite make sense, they tore them all down, had a big bonfire, danced around it, prayed to Satan, and had the best summer that ever existed.
	But this generation, these baby boomers, were raised in a system with all of these rules.
	We still had a pretty strong sense of religion.
	And so they were raised respecting all these rules.
	It's a knee-jerk.
	You know, the same way that every kid in North America was taught to line up before coming in from elementary school.
	Forming cues, forming lines, that's just something we're trained in.
	We don't need somebody ordering us to form a line.
	We don't need a banner telling us to line up this way.
	We automatically form lines.
	And so the baby boomers, even though they threw out all this morality, they said there was no reason for believing in it.
	They kept believing in it.
	So the hippie girls, well, they slept around a little bit.
	They had two or three partners.
	But eventually they settled down and got married.
	They might have rejected the God, but they still had all the rules.
	But then one by one by one, each of these social norms got cast aside.
	One social norm at a time, society degenerated into the present moral morass, where none of us know what to do.
	We no longer have any rules for what we are supposed to do about anything.
	And it's up to each one of us to try and reinvent what it means to be a decent person because we've gotten rid of the objective truth.
	We're in relative truth.
	Do whatever makes you feel good.
	And it's not just in morality that this comes into play.
	Okay, so the religious example is pretty obvious.
	But, you know, let's look at what happens in the business world when you lose the absolute truth and you start worshiping the objective truth.
	In the business world, the three levels of truth would correspond to the following.
	The absolute truth is why is the company there in the first place?
	What is the purpose of this company?
	And the purpose of any company ultimately boils down to we are going to make the best goddamn widget at the best goddamn price that we can.
	That is the company's absolute truth.
	That's its higher purpose for existing.
	Its objective truth is profit.
	Are we making more money this quarter than we made last quarter?
	Because a company needs to earn profit for it to continue to exist.
	And down at the level of relative truth, that is where we get the day-to-day operations.
	What is the culture of this company?
	What's the organization of the human resources department?
	What's the attitude?
	What's the morale?
	The team building, etc.
	That's the relative truth.
	And you need all three.
	All three levels are fundamental to this company succeeding.
	But the absolute truth is the most important.
	Remember, if you want to live life, give it up.
	Then you can live life.
	But if you try to hold on to life, you are going to be so terrified of dying that you never actually live.
	That terror drags you down into the relative truth.
	And it's no different for a company.
	Nowadays, we don't have absolute truth anymore.
	Now, we try and have the absolute truth.
	We have the company mission statement, but that's just some words.
	That's just a plaque put on a wall somewhere.
	And you know what?
	A majority vote with the shareholders can change that.
	Nobody actually worries about that.
	The point of the company, we're all good Austrians, aren't we?
	The point of the company is to make money.
	The objective truth.
	That's all we have.
	have some pretty words and you know that that that acknowledgement that yeah humans have the spiritual aspect to us we need to something bigger than and so we'll make up a a slogan a motto and At the end of the day, are we making money?
	That's all that matters.
	And so you take this company, founded by an idealist.
	Somebody with an idea to make money, but to also do it in a socially positive way.
	So they create this company.
	But they get older, they hire more people, it expands.
	Now we're only focused on the objective truth.
	And this motto.
	What does it mean to make the best widget at the best price?
	Well, what if we lowered the quality of the widget, but we also lowered the quality of the price?
	What if we could get a greater market share by doing that?
	What if we hired a huge marketing department to make sure that people wanted our product more than others?
	See, now we're going from the profit motive down to the relative truth and marketing.
	Because if you market a product properly, if I hand you, for example, two cans of cola, one's name brand, one's no-name brand, just looking at the labels, people are going to say that the name brand product tastes better.
	That's how effective marketing is.
	Even us, even people that don't watch TV, even people that try and avoid this stuff, the name brand on it is going to make it seem higher quality.
	We're down to relative truth now.
	So this company that was once about making the best product and contributing to civilization is now trying to measure market trends.
	It's trying to understand what the relative truth is of the consumer base and target them.
	So if this means completely sacrificing quality in the widget, they will do that because that is the logic of objective truth, quickly tunneling down into relative.
	The marketing tunnels down into relative truth, and then the company organization.
	So here we're talking about company morale, about the HR department, about team building exercises.
	In the company that remembers why it's there, if they get a genius working for them who's a bit of a grumpy person, they're going to use leadership.
	Leadership up here, the absolute truth, they're going to pull that into being a functioning organization.
	But now that we're down here to relative truth, we no longer have anything pulling us upward.
	There's no reason to take this genius and integrate him into the company.
	Instead, what we're going to do now is say, you know what, you're making other people look bad.
	You're causing tensions in the workplace.
	We're now going to be looking at how people are feeling, and that's all.
	This is where we get workplace harassment suits.
	This is where we get the Peter principle.
	And this is where we get just the general decline of corporations in this economy.
	They no longer care if you're doing a good job.
	Because we've slidden out of objective truth at this point.
	Nobody cares if they're making a good product anymore.
	They just care if the workforce is happy and that there's nobody complaining.
	And finally, let's look at how this destroys our modern political systems.
	Specifically, let's look at libertarianism.
	Because I know, listen, everybody here, we like the idea of limited government, responsible government, lower taxes, more free market.
	These are all great things.
	This is how a properly run country works.
	In fact, the best example of a libertarian country is a monarchy.
	And the second best is an aristocracy.
	This is something that the latest issue of Radish Mag covered.
	It gave essentially showing that whenever you look very closely at libertarians, you wind up scratching the surface and seeing a bit of red.
	You see some communist values coming out with a lot of these libertarian thinkers.
	Even Rothbard.
	You can find it in there.
	So he gives you the examples of how all of this happens.
	I'm going to explain why it happens.
	So with libertarianism, to do it quickly, libertarianism, you take a document, you write down a bunch of principles on it, and you call it sacred.
	You call it magic.
	You take this document, which is something written in objective reality and subject to the legalism of objective reality, and you call that the absolute truth.
	Unfortunately, it doesn't make it the absolute truth.
	If this Bill of Rights, if this Constitution is the highest authority, your authority exists in the objective world and is subject to the legalism, the flaws, and the degradation that the objective world is always subject to.
	So you take this Declaration of Human Rights, this bill that you wrote, and you've got these enumerated values on it.
	Freedom of speech, association, you know, being able to start your own business, whatever.
	So you've got this document, you start your country, and everything seems to be going pretty well at first.
	But then something funny happens.
	You take this document which embraces equality, and you start to get inequality.
	People are born different.
	Some are smarter, some are luckier, some are harder working.
	And the people that are smarter, luckier, and harder working, they wind up amassing most of the wealth out of their cohort.
	It's not a big deal, first generation.
	You know, they're the boss, but everybody has a decent home.
	Then the second generation comes along.
	Their kids inherit their genes, their propensity to being able to make money.
	And their kids then have an extra bonus.
	They have it in an inequal starting place.
	Some people are born poor, others are born rich.
	And you do this through three or four or five generations, and you start to have some pretty substantial differences between those born into privilege and those born into poverty.
	And this document that was supposed to make everybody equal, to start to give everybody a chance in this civilization, doesn't really seem to make much sense anymore.
	What good is freedom of speech if nobody listens to you?
	Ted Turner owns most of the media, so how does his freedom of speech compare to my freedom of speech?
	We can enumerate them one by one, but I think you get the point.
	Eventually this document that was supposed to make all men are created equal winds up reinforcing inequality.
	And so we change it a little bit.
	Suddenly it's not just the federal government's job to provide a military and build highways.
	We, you know what?
	We need public schooling.
	We need a safety net.
	We need Obamacare.
	Bit by bit by bit, this inequality flows into relative truth once again.
	The objective truth is that this document that makes everybody equal makes everybody inequal.
	And so, if this document is going to make everybody equal, we need to start changing what equal is.
	And so, even if you became a millionaire through the sweat of your own brow, we still need to drag you down.
	Harrison Bertrand.
	And the problem is that what are we supposed to say exactly?
	Like, let's say we're trying to hold the objective truth.
	So, you have these robber barons as a direct product of all of these objective freedoms that you gave everybody.
	What's the problem?
	What's the problem with them being a robber baron?
	You know, this is a free country.
	And these poor people that have no other choices freely signed up to work for the robber baron.
	And the robber baron is freely doing the most he can with his money.
	What's the problem?
	That's his pursuit of happiness, isn't it?
	He's not violating anybody else's human rights.
	What are you going to criticize him for?
	What did he do wrong?
	Nothing, as long as you're staying in objective truth.
	When the absolute truth is that a country exists to better the human soul, to better the human individual.
	And this does not mean, see, the communists, again, they're all the way down in relative truth.
	They just want everybody to eat the exact same sandwich, and that is happiness.
	The neo-reactionary wants people to be better, to improve themselves.
	And so in that world, in that world where we still have an absolute truth that isn't written down on a piece of paper, but that people make the moral decision to have faith in, in that world, you point to the extreme wealthy.
	You point to the Goldman Sachs, the ones getting the massive bailouts and the golden parachutes, and you say that you, sir, have been derelict in your duty as a leader of civilization.
	Let's not forget the seventh principle of leadership.
	Develop leadership tendencies in your subordinates.
	Being a leader is not the boss.
	Being a leader is to nurture those under you.
	But the libertarian is existing in this materialist age with an objective truth.
	And the higher mystery, the higher paradox.
	How is it that you can both rule and serve at the same time?
	That's a paradox in objective truth.
	It only makes sense at the level of absolute truth.
	And so this is the problem, folks.
	In our materialist age, where we think we have everything explained, everything crumbles down into schizophrenia and madness and feelings.
	And that is the world where it suddenly becomes rational to starve 7 million people to death because they are slightly inconvenient.
	There is no absolute truth that we're pinning all of this on.
	There is no higher purpose to the whole system that we're pinning it on.
	So when you look, you look at the welfare queen, or you look at the scam artist banker, these are products of an objective truth crumbling into relative truth.
	You take materialism and you look close enough.
	You study the foundational particles of physics.
	You study the foundations of mathematics.
	And you start to notice that there's nothing there.
	There's nothing that fits into the objective truth box.
	And that's when you make the decision.
	You become a postmodernist, or you become a neo-reactionary.
	You choose Marxism and evil, or you choose hierarchy and righteousness.
	Breene out,

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