Nov. 10, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the author of "The Art of the Argument, Western Civilizations Last Stand" | ||
| and the host of Free Domain Radio, Stéphane Molyneux. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great pleasure to be here. | ||
| It's been a while. | ||
| It has been a while. | ||
| I've been on your show a couple times. | ||
| Before we get into anything of real substance, though, I do feel we have to address the amount of gray that we both have in our beards. | ||
| What's with the chin area? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, the first time I had a beard, and it went grey, I've been outside in Canada in the winter, and I was like, oh, it's just a little bit of, you know, a little snow, a little ice, or something like that, and it's like, doesn't brush away, because it's Father Time doing his work. | ||
| I have never had a beard in my life. | ||
| This is my first beard ever, so I didn't even know that grey was there. | ||
| Now I feel old and tired. | ||
| And here's the thing, too. | ||
| Once you have the beard in public view, you can't darken it. | ||
| No, you can't, because it's too late. | ||
| Even if you get a bit of stubble, because, you know, there's people who obsess about everyone's looks on the internet. | ||
| You get a little bit of stubble, you can't polish it up, you can't do that, you know, you just gotta let it go. | ||
| What number are you buzzing with? | ||
| I'm sort of like a number two kind of thing. | ||
| Well, I'm like an eight. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| See, I went into the controversial stuff. | ||
| Well, now, here's the thing, because you're okay because you have fairly lengthy hair, but I cannot be the guy with a beard much longer than his hair. | ||
| That's a whole, like, Montana living in the caves kind of look that has you, like, everyone thinks that you're cooking beans on a fire in an old shoe, waiting for the end of civilization. | ||
| There's got to be a YouTube series about that. | ||
| I'm sure, but yeah, so I've got to keep it fairly trim, no matter which way. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, we have a lot to get to, and I really want to talk about the book, but I thought the best way to sort of start this is that I know I'm gonna get a certain amount of hate just for sitting across from you. | ||
| And as I said, I've been on your show a couple times before, and we've had nothing but pleasant conversations. | ||
| We've talked about liberalism and logic and reason and all that stuff. | ||
| But I think you're somewhat aware of that type of thing, that for some people you are... Negative opinions about a free thinker on the internet? | ||
| I think actually pre-internet it was Socrates and then, you know, Copernicus, not to put myself in such lofty categories, but there certainly is when you are an original thinker and when you really try and, particularly when you scrub things down to the bare minimum, like René Descartes said, like, what if I know nothing whatsoever? | ||
| What if I just wipe everything out and try and build A cohegent and rational framework of thinking and of understanding the world and of understanding ethics. | ||
| What if I just pretend I know nothing, which is the Socratic commandment. | ||
| You know nothing. | ||
| What are you going to build from scratch? | ||
| And I think that's the modern world, is when people said, we don't know anything. | ||
| We don't know whether the sun or the earth is the center of the solar system. | ||
| We don't know anything. | ||
| Let's just pretend we know nothing. | ||
| We don't even know if the king is put there by God. | ||
| We don't know if the aristocracy is put there by God. | ||
| We don't know if the priests are right about everything. | ||
| What if we just wipe the slate clean and then we build things up? | ||
| And we get modern civilization, I think, out of that. | ||
| But there are a lot of entrenched interests that profit from existing error. | ||
| And when people come along with better arguments, well, it can be a little confusing. | ||
| It's gotta be a little controversial. | ||
| Toss in a certain dose of Twitter and then you know you get where we are. | ||
| Now it's funny because I've had a little bit of a change over the last couple months where I was kind of really just you know everybody talks about well we've never been more divided, we're all angry at each other, we all hate each other. | ||
| I think there's actually a great opportunity right now for people that are talking about ideas and I include you in that. | ||
| But what would you say is the thing that people find most controversial about you? | ||
| Is there one topic that you consistently hit on that you think people either give you the most flack or you think is sort of wading into the most dangerous territory? | ||
| Gosh, if I knew that, Dave, I would hit on it more. | ||
| Well, I've got a couple right here, but I thought I'd throw that to you first. | ||
| I think, I would say, I would say that the concept Well, so there's some abstract ones and there's some personal ones. | ||
| And people tend to get most upset about the personal ones because that's where people have kind of like a stake in their life and in their world. | ||
| So for me, for sure, I think people get most upset when I talk about, say, for instance, you don't have to have abusive people in your life. | ||
| You know, whether they're... That's number two. | ||
| I have one above that, but we can start with that one. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, you know, when I was growing up, I don't know, for some of you listeners, they may, you know, Paleozoic maybe. | ||
| But when I was growing up, this was everywhere when I was a kid. | ||
| And this was part of the feminist revolution, right, where they said, If you are with an abusive man, you should get out. | ||
| You should, you know, hit the road, Jack. | ||
| Don't look back. | ||
| Deep in the rearview, nothing but dust, right? | ||
| And that was something that I grew up with. | ||
| If you're being abused, if you're in an abusive relationship, then you should not be in that relationship. | ||
| Now, I actually think that's a little too harsh. | ||
| I think you should sit down and talk with people and try and reason things out and so on. | ||
| That seems relatively uncontroversial when you're talking about adults, but I think one of the things that people got upset about was when I logically, at least to me, extended that to, if you're an adult and you had an abusive parent, do you actually need to continue to spend time with that abusive parent? | ||
| And the answer to me is, well, no. | ||
| Because if you marry someone, that's a chosen relationship, right? | ||
| I mean, but your parent is someone Like, I'm a parent, right, and I recognize that my daughter did not choose me. | ||
| She's like, eeny, meeny, miny, moe. | ||
| It wasn't like some, you know, this platonic idea that you're kind of floating above the world, you look down and you can choose. | ||
| Unless there's some cosmic game that you don't know about. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't really, I mean. | ||
| So she didn't choose me, so it's an involuntary relationship for children. | ||
| And to me, you have to have the very highest standards When you have the least voluntary relationship. | ||
| And so when I put that argument forward, well, some people seem to get quite upset. | ||
| And it has always been, you know, from a logical standpoint, it's completely baffling. | ||
| From a sort of personal standpoint, I can understand why. | ||
| So on the logical front, it makes sense because you would just remove bad influences from your life, whether they're part of your family or not your family. | ||
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It's just that, I think... Well, I think talk to them first, right? | |
| I mean, you don't just... So that's what I wanted to ask. | ||
| How far do you think you have to go before you would cut out something like a parent? | ||
| I mean, I have this sort of rule, I don't tell people what to do in the show, because I mean, not only would that be kind of megalomaniacal, but also, let's say somebody just obeys you, they haven't learned anything, right? | ||
| So I wouldn't sort of say to people what, but I would say that it's hard to have a better relationship in your life than your worst relationship. | ||
| And so if you have a very dysfunctional relationship, and there are certainly people out there whose parents were unfathomably evil towards them, like molestation, rape, violent abuse, massive neglect, and so on, right? | ||
| So I think try and talk to people in your life, but do not think that it's like physics, that you just have to have | ||
| relationships. | ||
| Because I'm very big for free will, very big for choices. | ||
| And I always have a kind of reflexive pushback against "you have to." | ||
| You know, "Well, it's your father's birthday, you have to call him." | ||
| It's like, "Well, he beat me up every day of our childhood." | ||
| Do I? | ||
| Maybe I'll skip this one. | ||
| No, because people don't say, well, you chose this man, you have to stay married to him, even if he's drunkenly beating you every night. | ||
| People say no. | ||
| And again, that's a chosen relationship. | ||
| So involuntary relationships, I think there's a higher standard. | ||
| So I think it's important you sit down and talk about If you've had a difficult history with your family or parents, sit down and talk about it with them. | ||
| If they want to go to therapy or if they want to try and find ways to resolve it, so much the better. | ||
| What can be repaired should be repaired, but that's not up to you in the end. | ||
| Is part of the conflict there that so many of us walk around not really dealing with issues in the first place? | ||
| I remember once years ago, about 10 years ago, a good friend of mine was telling me about his relationship with his dad. | ||
| And he said his dad was abusive and was always drunk, and that one night, his dad came home drunk and basically just beat the living hell out of him, and that he, as a 12-year-old, knew at that moment, this guy is just a dirtbag, and I'm gonna always treat him as such. | ||
| And in a bizarre way, he had very clean feelings about it, because the act of being punched and beaten was so clean. | ||
| But I think a lot of people, if you don't get hit, There's all sorts of other abuse, so you walk around in this sort of half-truth phase, you know, and you can't quite parse it out. | ||
| Do you think that's part of it, that people don't quite... Yeah, people have good and bad memories. | ||
| ...go through the adventure, yeah. | ||
| You know, there's very few people in the world that's like, well, that person was evil from dawn until dusk. | ||
| They woke up, they were evil, and there was never... I mean, people always have good memories, even of bad people in their life, and so it definitely is complicated. | ||
| And if you can use the good memories as a way of hooking the relationship to a better place, fantastic. | ||
| We were talking just a little bit before about, you know, the sort of Weinstein scandal and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And just while we were talking, the thought popped into my mind, Dave, that we look at Hollywood and we say, oh, you know, these people, they seem to know, or there's lots of indications or lots of jokes or lots of stuff where people said, oh, we knew, we knew. | ||
| And then people go, why didn't they say something? | ||
| Why didn't they say something? | ||
| And it's like, well, you can think that the only problem with that is somewhere out in Hollywood, somewhere out among the rich, famous, pretty people. | ||
| Who have massive talent, more money, and it seems like decreasing levels of ethics as every day goes forward. | ||
| But what about people in your own life? | ||
| Do you know, for instance, not you personally, but do you, the audience, know somebody who's mistreating a child? | ||
| Do you know a parent who is? | ||
| And this can be neglect. | ||
| Neglect is a very, very powerful form of abuse that is very hard to Unpack in your mind. | ||
| Do you have suspicions? | ||
| You know, do you see parents, you know, screaming at their children or spending their whole time on the cell phone and not talking to them and so on? | ||
| Is there something that you can do to improve that? | ||
| To remind them and say, you know, your kids are only young ones. | ||
| Try and engage them in a positive way. | ||
| Teach them how to be rational by being rational to them and love them and be positive to them. | ||
| Because it's not just out there in Hollywood where there's all this bad stuff that people aren't doing. | ||
| Most people, if you have any kind of extended social circle, extended family and so on, most people have something in their life that they could stand up for and say, this needs to be better, this should be improved. | ||
| And I think that's one of the fascinations that's going on with this Hollywood scandal is people are saying, they do say, well what about all the people who knew but didn't do anything? | ||
| But I think most of us, and I count myself in this as well in parts of my life, I've looked in the mirror and said, I know that something's not right and I'm skating over it. | ||
| I'm kind of, you know, sidestepping it. | ||
| I'm crossing my fingers. | ||
| Or maybe just withdrawing contact if there's some difficult situation you see between a parent and child or anyone. | ||
| So I think we all have that responsibility, but I think it's kind of erupting in our consciousness through that very distant event that's easier to talk about for a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of this whole situation? | ||
| I mean, we're watching, it seems like the entire industry is collapsing in front of us. | ||
| I know you're not a major fan of what Hollywood has been putting out and the type of moral preaching that these people do, and I'm not either. | ||
| I don't mind moral preaching from good people. | ||
| I said that these people do. | ||
| So I would assume at some level you're enjoying watching it be exposed, but we briefly, for a second before we started taping, we're talking about how this now could wring its tentacles everywhere, where everyone is going to look back and go, 20 years ago someone touched my knee. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| And I don't want to really focus on that part, but we're sort of opening a Pandora's box here that is kind of dangerous. | ||
| But I think it's essential. | ||
| I mean, I think this has to be done. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| To be clear, I'm glad the monsters are going down. | ||
| Well, but who knows who's a monster at the moment. | ||
| Right now, it's dark and there are lots of eyes out there. | ||
| There are tentacles flying around. | ||
| I don't know who's a good guy and who's a bad guy. | ||
| I mean, clearly there's some people like the Weinsteins and so on. | ||
| It's like, you know, that's some pretty nasty stuff. | ||
| And I know he's got a bunch of investigations into rape. | ||
| I think in New York there's no statute of limitations so they can We'll go after that. | ||
| But right now, I think we're kind of in the midst of a hysteria. | ||
| And that is fairly common when these kinds of new things come out. | ||
| So when I was a kid, this was child abuse. | ||
| Sorry, this was wife abuse. | ||
| Wife abuse was the big thing that was going on. | ||
| This was not talked about. | ||
| I had a feminist advocate, Erin Pizzi, on the show a couple of years ago, and she was saying that she ran one of the first shelters for women who are being abused and a lot of times the priest would come down and say sorry love you gotta go back you made a vow and and all of this and this was when I was a kid this was the big thing that was coming out and then it was child abuse that came out a little bit later now this kind of sexual harassment stuff is something that is coming out and | ||
| Because it's kind of a hysteria, it means there are some bad people who are being exposed. | ||
| There are people who are kind of on the line, who are going to take some real hits to their reputations. | ||
| And of course, inevitably, there are going to be some good people who are taken down unjustly. | ||
| And what we need to do is have a conversation about all of this. | ||
| As a whole, you know, where there is this power disparity, where there is this sexual exploitation. | ||
| And I do believe, and I made this case before, that there is a very, very dark heart somewhere in Hollywood. | ||
| You know, the stuff that Corey Feldman has talked about, the stuff that Elijah Wood talked about, the pedophilia and all of this. | ||
| There is some very, very dark stuff in there and the... What do you think the genesis of that is? | ||
| Do you think it's just power and money and then... | ||
| Crazy morals, lack of morals. | ||
| I mean, what is it about Hollywood? | ||
| Although this could be happening in any industry right now and we just so happen to know about this one. | ||
| We're hearing about it in the sports world. | ||
| We've heard about it in academia. | ||
| I just did a show recently on how prevalent this kind of abuse can be in government schools. | ||
| I think it's just something that needs to come out. | ||
| Where it comes from in particular, You know, power corrupts. | ||
| And when you have a lot of power, when you have huge numbers of people who want the opportunities that you offer them... | ||
| It's really tempting and, I think, easy to use that power. | ||
| I mean, as a public figure, I'm sure you're aware of the effect that you have on people. | ||
| I'm aware of the effect that I have on people. | ||
| And it is very, very important to be aware of everybody's fundamental capacity to be corrupted by power. | ||
| And if you have influence in the world, you need to be very, very careful about how you wield it. | ||
| But there is a kind of A gross sort of sensuality in certain areas of Hollywood that does not appear to have any particular moral restraint. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not religious myself, but it is a godless world in Hollywood. | ||
| And I don't know that they have the kind of abstract ethics that would cause That restraint or that cognizance, you know, the one great thing about Christianity is how it talks about the devil and temptations and fallen humanity that puts you on guard against your worst self. | ||
| And if you're not on guard against your worst self and you have that kind of power, I think it's a real slippery slope. | ||
| It's interesting you just ended that with that about atheism and Christianity, | ||
| 'cause I've noticed lately, and I'm around obviously a lot of atheists, | ||
| and I've talked to a lot of atheists and believers and half believers and non-believers, whatever it is, | ||
| but I do sense a little bit in the atheist community that because secularism has gone so awry suddenly, | ||
| or not secularism as much as just our systems seem to be struggling right now, | ||
| that I do sense that people have a little more respect for certain pieces of religion a little bit. | ||
| Does that make sense to you? | ||
| I would certainly be the poster boy for that, for what it's worth. | ||
| I was very harsh on Christianity earlier in my career, and I have apologized for that, | ||
| and I have withdrawn from that position, because the one thing that atheists, | ||
| I mean, intellectually, the position of atheism is very hard to assail. | ||
| Because you have to go with faith, and if you have an empirical, rational view of the universe, faith doesn't cut it. | ||
| Faith is, you know, I'm right. | ||
| Closing your eyes and saying that you're seeing something different is not the same as being scientific. | ||
| So intellectually, atheism is a very, very easy position. | ||
| But the great challenge, I think, That has happened. | ||
| You know, seeing how the rise of atheism is causing also a rise in state power. | ||
| It is causing a decay in borders and boundaries and nation states. | ||
| It is causing a moral collapse across society. | ||
| It is causing a blurring of rational biological categories and empirical methodologies. | ||
| So, I think the big concern I have is something like this. | ||
| The world is a difficult and dangerous place, and the world within, our own hearts and the world that is out there, we need ways to guide ourselves. | ||
| We need ethics. | ||
| We need morality. | ||
| Now, atheists looked at religion and said, not true. | ||
| And again, metaphysically, epistemologically, it's really hard to sustain the argument for religion, but why did people believe in God? | ||
| Did they believe in God because they genuinely believed that Loaves could be turned into fishes, and water could be turned into wine, and people could walk on water. | ||
| I would say no. | ||
| I mean, people didn't believe in that. | ||
| That was a way that they expressed why they found it so important, that it's miraculous. | ||
| But I think that they believed in religion because it gave a structure of self-restraint that is essential for civilization, and we can talk about this with the book, that you need to restrain your own capacity for violence and dominance and aggression and bullying in order to have Rational discussions. | ||
| So people took shelter in a church and the atheists came along and they said, that church is terrible. | ||
| That church is not a valid structure. | ||
| And they ripped the roof off the church. | ||
| But it's hailing and there's lightning and people are then exposed to the elements above. | ||
| Okay, rip the roof off the church, but you better build another structure for people to get to. | ||
| Right, so that's the missing piece. | ||
| That's the missing piece, and this is why one of the first things I did as a public intellectual was work on a rational system of ethics, because we need to have a reason to have self-restraint. | ||
| If we don't have a reason to have self-restraint, you know, our inner apes come out and it just becomes about power and control. | ||
| It's interesting, because I had a really great discussion on this with Michael Shermer and with Dennis Prager, and Michael is an atheist and a skeptic, and basically Dennis said that on the micro level, he's like, yeah, you can be moral, I have no doubt that you're moral, you know, looking at him in the face, I have no doubt that you're moral and all of those things, but on the macro level for society, and that's really what you're talking about, that there isn't enough of a structure otherwise. | ||
| I think there's an interesting argument there, for sure. | ||
| Well, to me, Atheist ethics is like diets for thin people. | ||
| I mean, if you're already thin, you don't need a diet. | ||
| Well, I guess they would say it's enlightenment values. | ||
| Well, okay, but they can say enlightenment values, but the reason we need ethics are for people who really want to do evil. | ||
| I mean, you're a nice guy, I'm a nice guy, we're not sitting there going, okay, there's a homeless guy, there's a cinder block. | ||
| I could go drop the cinder block! | ||
| We don't have those impulses, so for me, I don't have to fight this demonic lust for, you know... But there are people out there who really want that, and the fear of the devil, and the fear of hell, and the fear of eternal damnation. | ||
| Kept those people in check. | ||
| It was like a little prison that they could walk around inside of. | ||
| They could rattle the cages and so on, but it kept them restrained. | ||
| It's sort of a depressing view of what humanity is in a way. | ||
| It's like that some people could escape it, and some people just need it. | ||
| And I guess that you could eventually get out of it would be the hope if that's what it is, right? | ||
| Well, the data seems to be pretty clear that if you're raised peacefully as a child, raised reasonably as a child, not hit, not screamed at, not yelled at, not neglected, then you're going to grow up to be a good person with empathy and so on. | ||
| But, you know, like there's a couple of percentage points out there of people who are genuine sociopaths and psychopaths, no conscience, no remorse. | ||
| Will to power stuff. | ||
| What is going to restrain them? | ||
| Well, in the past there was the devil, there was hell, and there was condemnation and ostracism by the community based on universally held moral values. | ||
| The atheists came along and said, okay, undoing God is one thing, undoing ethics is quite another. | ||
| And if atheists say, well, you know, but we're good, it's like, not all atheists are good. | ||
| When people give up on God, and then they give up on morality, as a result, I think what we end up missing is not God, but morality. | ||
| And if we don't have that need for self-restraint, if we don't have an understanding of the darker side of human nature, which we all carry, which we're all susceptible to, atheists have a very optimistic view that if you remove superstition from people's lives, Paradise. | ||
| And I don't see that particularly playing out. | ||
| Right, I guess this is where Jordan Peterson, who you've had on your show several times, and I've had on a bunch of times, would talk about these archetypes, that we just need them. | ||
| But it's so interesting, because you yourself are an atheist, and in a way, anyone listening to that five minutes that we just did would go, this guy doesn't sound like much of an atheist, but I get you're making the separation between your own intellect and society. | ||
| I think it's a really rich spot. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is just a question which, you know, people who are watching and listening to this, Dave, can just go to the worst person they know and try and merely reason them into being a good person. | ||
| No, it is a tough row to hoe. | ||
| Like, I do a call-in show every week, hours and hours of talking with people about philosophy and virtue and how to improve their lives and so on, and it's hard. | ||
| You know, people go and try and talk other people into being good, and it's really, really tough. | ||
| On the other hand, If you are religious and it's, you know, hellfire and damnation, that's going to get people's attention. | ||
| Now you have, in a sense, you have heaven to offer them and you have hell to punish them with. | ||
| Now, for us as a society, you don't, I don't think you actually need heaven and hell, but you need rewards and punishments. | ||
| And jail is not enough. | ||
| So, the rewards and punishment that normally occur within society are acceptance and ostracism. | ||
| You know, there have been studies that show that if you are ostracized by a community, it evokes the same mental and emotional and physical states as direct physical torture. | ||
| And for obvious biological reasons, we needed the cooperation of the tribe to reproduce, to survive, to flourish. | ||
| But we don't have, because we've got this big giant redistributionist welfare state, we don't have the capacity to ostracize anyone anymore. | ||
| People, you know, there used to be this very tight control over teenage sexuality in the past. | ||
| And there was chaperones and, you know, the shotgun weddings and so on, right? | ||
| Maybe a little too far in some ways, but why did people care so much about youthful sexuality? | ||
| Why was there no sex before marriage and so on? | ||
| Because if your daughter got pregnant and there was no one around to be her husband and take care of her, you as the parents would have to pay To raise that child. | ||
| She'd move in with you and then your whole retirement plans would get scotched and there wouldn't be any playing baccarat on the southern Riviera of France or something. | ||
| And so you had a direct impulse. | ||
| But now there's this big welfare state. | ||
| You know, it's not that great, but it doesn't directly impact me. | ||
| So we've lost the capacity to ostracize people. | ||
| And if you don't have hell and you don't have ostracism, What the hell causes people to restrain their bad behavior? | ||
| I don't have an answer. | ||
| Maybe there is one. | ||
| If the audience want to let us know, I'd love to hear it, but I haven't seen one yet. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because also the welfare state in many ways, it benefits you to have more children, which is a whole other thing. | ||
| But let's circle back a little bit just to the family. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm drawing you into the welfare state. | ||
| Join me. | ||
| Let's push that for just a moment. | ||
| Yeah, but just to sort of end the family thing. | ||
| Yeah Because we did a very circuitous route to the to the end of it So I think partly what people would say and this is I was trying to find okay What are people criticizing Stefan on they say? | ||
| Well what he's basically then offering a cult that if you were to disband this thing about the family even if I think You had legitimate reasons. | ||
| The alternative is it's sort of like, come to me and join my cult. | ||
| I don't hear you saying that, I'm just saying. | ||
| Join my cult? | ||
| Yeah, no, no. | ||
| My podcast? | ||
| But you understand what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But that is sort of like, well, if ultimately the family is crumbling, then what's gonna be on the other side of it, I think. | ||
| Well, I don't think I would say that the family is crumbling at all. | ||
| My concern is the next generation. | ||
| And if you had an abusive parent and then you yourself become a parent and you haven't resolved things with your abusive parent and the abuse is most likely going to be to some degree at least transmitted down the chain. | ||
| So my concern is the next generation that you need to have a positive peaceful and rational environment to raise your children in. | ||
| And so that's my particular concern. | ||
| You know, regarding the cult thing, I mean, okay, so are people saying that the family, you can't leave? | ||
| That's a little cult-y. | ||
| That seems like, okay, you can't leave, it's like a roach motel, you check in biologically through no choice of your own, but you can't ever get out, no matter how you're treated. | ||
| But let me ask you, what do you think would be behavior on the part of a parent that may potentially justify an adult breaking relations with them? | ||
| Well, if it was an endlessly violent, physically violent, or emotionally violent, abusive relationship, I agree with you. | ||
| Once you're an adult, you have every right to manage your relationships as you see fit. | ||
| And if your parents, either one of them, or your uncle, or your brother, or whatever it was, was abusive to you your whole life, if you don't feel, if you, yeah, it would be nice if you could sit down, hopefully, and try to talk some of this out, which is what you said earlier. | ||
| But whether you do that or not, it's your choice. | ||
| I do believe in the individual. | ||
| I don't operate on guilt, so I wouldn't try to guilt someone into not doing it. | ||
| And I say that as someone that believes that the bonds of family are incredibly powerful, perhaps the most powerful force outside of us. | ||
| The other thing, too, is that, to take a somewhat silly but I think important analogy, The post office, not very efficient. | ||
| You know, the Department of Motor Vehicles, you know, there's that sloth scene in Zootopia, you know, just like, it's not an accident that that's a government place of employment, right? | ||
| And the reason why these, you know, government schools and the IRS and like these big giant government institutions, the government itself, not particularly responsive Because you have no choice. | ||
| Now, if you were to privatize the post office, and this sounds like a political argument, but it's not. | ||
| If you were to privatize the post office, then we would assume that, much like FedEx and other places, that the service would improve, because now you have a choice. | ||
| So the funny thing is that some people have said that I am somehow doing something negative to families, but the introduction of choice is what raises quality. | ||
| And so if parents out there just assume that their children We'll always have to spend time with them. | ||
| We'll always be there for them. | ||
| We'll show up for birthdays. | ||
| We'll be around when they get older. | ||
| No matter how badly they treat them, that's kind of like the post office. | ||
| There's no volunteers in there. | ||
| There's no incentive in a weird way. | ||
| Whereas if you introduce the idea of voluntary relationships within the family, my goal is not to make the family worse. | ||
| It's like saying, well, you're going to destroy the post office by privatizing. | ||
| It's like, no, no, we're going to make it better by introducing the value of choice into the post office. | ||
| What I want is, you know, like these old Soviet factories, you know, like under Stalin, you know, the old saying, you know, that they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work and they just, you know, put out these indifferent goods, because there was no voluntarism. | ||
| There was no positive or negative consequences, so they didn't care. | ||
| But if parents out there, and I'm very happy that this idea is out there of the voluntary family, because what it does, and I'm aware of it myself, my daughter, when she grows up, you don't have to spend any time with me. | ||
| So I better make her a child that's so great that she wants to. | ||
| And so the privatization of the family, which is the removal of, well, it's just like physics, you have to spend time with your family no matter what, means that parents, as a service provider, Actually operating more in the free market, actually operating more in the realm of voluntarism. | ||
| And to me, everything we can move from absolutes to voluntarism is how relationships get improved. | ||
| So I do want parents to sit there and say, I kind of want to yell at my kids, but I know they don't have to see me when they get older, so I'm going to... Again, how do we restrain ourselves through negative consequences? | ||
| And if you can imagine, Well I guess way back in the day, like up until the 60s in Canada where I live, to get divorced you needed an act of parliament. | ||
| Now I was always told that Easy divorces improve the quality of marriage because husbands in general say, well, my wife could leave me so I'd better be better, right? | ||
| Whereas if you have to stay married, the quality of how you treat your spouse goes down. | ||
| And so, in a sense, by privatizing marriage, by allowing for no-fault divorce, I think it's gone too far, but nonetheless, by privatizing marriage, by making it more voluntary and making it something you could stay in or get out of, The quality of marriages, I think, in general has improved. | ||
| If you privatize the post office, it'll improve. | ||
| If you privatize the family of origin, I think it improves. | ||
| The goal is not to make things worse. | ||
| The goal is to make things better. | ||
| Now, that can be tough for some people. | ||
| You know, if you try and privatize the post office, People need to go insane, right? | ||
| This is the worst thing ever! | ||
| Catastrophe! | ||
| Disaster, right? | ||
| And I hate the guy who's saying privatize the post office, but the family needs to improve for society to improve. | ||
| And the only way I know how to improve things is to privatize them. | ||
| Okay, so we've talked about the family, and that's one of the things people find controversial about you. | ||
| I think really, though, the one that you didn't mention is the race and IQ stuff. | ||
| This is something you dive into a lot, and I think people think that there is somehow a racist element to it. | ||
| So I don't want to put any words in your mouth. | ||
| So do you want to make your basic argument around race and IQ? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Listen, I'll be very clear about this. | ||
| It's like saying, do you want to make your argument that the sun is the center of the solar system? | ||
| It's like, but it's not a personal thing. | ||
| Like, this is not an idea I have come up with. | ||
| Okay, so not your idea. | ||
| It's not like my formulation. | ||
| Like, I've got some beautiful mindset of like charts and lines in my basement. | ||
| It's like, it's all about the price of magnesium, man. | ||
| You know, I mean. | ||
| So I'm glad you countered with that. | ||
| Because in a way, my question accidentally was almost a setup. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I'll take that. | |
| I'm going to give a very, very brief history of what it is, and for those who don't know where the science is. | ||
| And I'm not a scientist, so people verify all of this. | ||
| I've got a whole list of interviews with subject matter experts on the show about this topic. | ||
| So listen to the experts. | ||
| This is my amateur summation, just for those who want to know. | ||
| So, the U.S. | ||
| Army, for over a hundred years, has been giving more or less IQ tests to people to figure out whether they're sort of officer material or, you know, grunt material, so to speak. | ||
| And what they noticed was between blacks and whites, and this becomes this bichromatic nonsense because the question of ethnicity and IQ is a whole layer cake. | ||
| You know, just very briefly, the very top, the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews that are the wandering Jews, so to speak, the Ashkenazi Jews. | ||
| You're sitting across from an Ashkenazi Jew. | ||
| Can you feel the IQ? | ||
| I actually am trying to hoover up some language skills from you. | ||
| I'll do it later with a straw. | ||
| I've been dumbing it down for you. | ||
| I know, and I appreciate that, you know. | ||
| As a Caucasian, I really need to go slow. | ||
| Lots of subtitles, hand puppets help as well. | ||
| So yeah, Ashkenazi Jews, as you know, and the science is like 115 IQ on average, but lower on spatial reasoning and higher, like even higher than 115 IQ on verbal stuff, right? | ||
| I mean, verbal acuity among Ashkenazi Jews is Through the roof, and it's the highest recorded that there is. | ||
| Some of how this fits with our general experience, I mean, what we're talking about, everybody kind of knows deep down, it's just that we don't have the scientific language or the mathematical language to describe it, and that's what we're trying to do. | ||
| So, you know, there's not a lot of famous Jewish architects or engineers, because Jews test an average around the hundreds in spatial reasoning. | ||
| But crazy high on verbal acuity, verbal reasoning. | ||
| So, of course, you would expect among novelists, among playwrights, among lawyers, where high verbal IQ is very important, you're going to find a lot of Ashkenazi Jews. | ||
| And, lo and behold, you do. | ||
| So what that means is that, let's say Ashkenazi Jews, sort of 120, 125 verbal IQ, And there's a certain proportion of them in the language field, but it's not anything to do with Judaism, it's to do with IQ. | ||
| And so what that means is that if you look at any group of people wherein they're in that IQ, they're going to be equally represented or proportioned. | ||
| And then under that you have, I don't know, the word oriental has kind of come out of favor, which is kind of annoying in a way because how do you differentiate people from India, people from East Asians, whatever, the Chinese, Japanese, and so on. | ||
| 103, 104, 105 IQ in general. | ||
| Very high. | ||
| spatial reasoning, which is why you know software engineers, other kinds of | ||
| engineers, you see that. You know like Google has this like 40% or | ||
| something like that of their engineers. Not much more because after this | ||
| diversity thing goes through they're gonna just have to pick everybody by | ||
| color and all that nonsense. But this is the thing right so if you're looking at East | ||
| Asians with very high spatial IQ they're gonna be quote over represented in those | ||
| engineering fields and so on but not because everyone who's got that IQ is up | ||
| There just happen to be more of those, right? | ||
| You've got your run-of-the-mill vanilla Caucasians coming in at a hundred. | ||
| And a hundred is just, I don't know, it's just the baseline. | ||
| They recalibrate it from time to time and so on. | ||
| And then below, I did some of this, what I call mestizos, or Hispanics sometimes called, although that's a very loosey-goosey term, and that sort of... | ||
| 85-90 and so on. | ||
| And then you've got blacks in North America, particularly African-Americans coming in at 85. | ||
| And there's been some upward drift a little bit. | ||
| And then below that, you start to get sub-Saharan blacks at 70. | ||
| There are pygmies in the high 50s, low 60s. | ||
| The indigenous people of Australia I think in the low 60s and some of these numbers again I don't have them all tattooed on my you know wrists or anything, but so there is this range it is Unbelievably heartbreaking. | ||
| I mean just just I'm straight up about all of this like this is one of the most difficult facts I've ever had to absorb in my life. | ||
| I mean, I've gone through a bunch of iterations as a thinker. | ||
| You know, I was a Christian and a socialist and all. | ||
| I mean, I've gone through... I won't go through a whole journey. | ||
| But I found almost nothing harder to absorb than this question of differences in IQ between groups. | ||
| And this goes back many, many decades. | ||
| This was talked about by Herrnstein in Murray, of course, in the bell curve in 94. | ||
| And nobody's been able to overturn that. | ||
| And their basic argument is to say, look, blacks make less money than Ashkenazi Jews. | ||
| But if you normalize by IQ, they don't. | ||
| And this is, again, it's heartbreaking stuff, and it is so difficult to absorb this into your daily thinking. | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Well, I just want to pause you for a second, because it's interesting you're describing it as heartbreaking and struggle, because that's what I was going to ask you, is that because you do talk about this stuff, I was gonna ask you, are you troubled by it? | ||
| Oh, it's horrible. | ||
| Because I don't know that I've gotten that exactly through your videos, but I obviously haven't seen everything that you've done on this. | ||
| So hearing you frame it in that way is actually different than a bit of the impression I had of you on this. | ||
| Oh, do you know how much I would give Dave to know that it was just racism? | ||
| Because that's a solvable problem, and people have been working on trying to solve the problem of racism. | ||
| Well, for hundreds of years. | ||
| I mean, it is... I mean, I wouldn't say I give my left arm because I'm left-handed, but I would give a lot to... I would give so much for it to just be racism. | ||
| So if you look at Criminality, right? | ||
| I mean, as you know, black males are, you know, young black males, 3 to 4% of the American population responsible for more than 50% of the homicides. | ||
| You look at what goes on in the South Side of Chicago. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| And yet, in general, it is not If you normalize by IQ, everybody who has an IQ of 85 has similar levels of criminality. | ||
| Whites in America have a certain particular level of homicide that's pretty low, and whites around the whole world have the same level of homicide. | ||
| Whites in England, whites in Belgium, whites in America all have the same level of homicide. | ||
| And the question, of course, is environment versus genetics. | ||
| I would love to have a clear answer to that, scientists making its way forward, but it's such a volatile topic that a lot of scientists would rather do anything than delve into this particular topic. | ||
| But it's extraordinarily heartbreaking, and it means to me that no amount of screams of racism Can be guaranteed to solve the problem. | ||
| And I think, isn't that what we've seen? | ||
| That the consciousness about race and racism has gone up so enormously. | ||
| And good, you know, like there was definite racism in the world. | ||
| But without this central fact, and it is a fact at the moment, even if we say it's 100% environmental, it's still a fact at the moment. | ||
| You know, even if we say... But is there evidence that it's genetic? | ||
| I'm not a geneticist. | ||
| Genetic in what regard? | ||
| I mean, if we took the brain of a 25-year-old black man and the brain of a 25-year-old white man, what is it that they're doing that... Different sizes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And again, this is dependent on every ethnicity, the hierarchy. | ||
| In general, there's lots of exceptions and so on. | ||
| There are different sizes. | ||
| There is evidence that if you take A white kid from a middle class household, for whatever reason, ends up being raised by a black family, the white kid's going to end up about 100 IQ. | ||
| If you take the average black kid, have them raised by an upper class middle white family or Jewish family and so on, they're going to end up at about 85. | ||
| So it does not appear to be strongly environmental. | ||
| I don't believe that there's no environmental causes. | ||
| You know, I've done lots of videos where I strongly urge the black community to breastfeed longer, to not hit their children, to do things that will give their kids the best shot at having higher IQs | ||
| because that's gonna make a huge amount of difference in American society. | ||
| And this is something that people need to talk about more is the quality of black parenting around the world, | ||
| but where in America the most could possibly be done is still quite low. | ||
| They hit their kids the most. | ||
| And if that can be improved, I mean, who knows what could change. | ||
| How far do you go down the rabbit hole of where all that starts? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That the most black people in America, their ancestors, were brought here as slaves, | ||
| that they didn't have equality for many hundreds of years, all of this, and then end up in poorer neighborhoods, | ||
| then they get stuck on the welfare system, and of course we're painting | ||
| with sort of broad brushes here, of course. | ||
| But that is the environmental factor, right? | ||
| Yes, and there's nobody who says, no sane person who says any human characteristic is 100% genetic. | ||
| But, again, and I would love to, I mean, I'm very keen on improving, particularly childhoods. | ||
| That's where I think the big thing is. | ||
| But, you know, a couple hundred years ago in Europe, people were like a foot shorter than they are now. | ||
| And that was not genetics, that was environment. | ||
| You know, not enough vitamin D, not enough nutrition as a whole, and back-breaking labor, and starting in childhood, and so on. | ||
| And so even if we were to say it's 100% environmental, these are the issues that we have right now. | ||
| So let's say that I could have been seven feet tall, but I didn't get enough food as a kid. | ||
| Okay, so that was environmental, but I'm still not seven feet tall at the moment. | ||
| Maybe my kids, it could be different and so on. | ||
| Nobody knows how to improve it at the moment. | ||
| That's the challenge. | ||
| You know, you get this Head Start program, where they pour $100 billion into trying to close the black-white achievement gap, and with no effect. | ||
| A few little bits at the beginning, and then it all generally tends to fade away. | ||
| So it is something that, it's a very difficult, unpleasant challenging phenomenon when we have different IQs and we | ||
| haven't even talked about male-female which again is a whole other challenge to | ||
| sort of absorb and understand but you know and it's funny because the left is | ||
| always complaining about and I'm neither left nor right but the left is always | ||
| saying anti-science People are anti-science and so on. | ||
| This is science. | ||
| IQ is a very, very good measure. | ||
| It's one of the few metrics in the social sciences that is, you know, measurable, empirical. | ||
| It's predictable, right? | ||
| I mean, if there was some, if people's IQ was wildly different from where they ended up in life, then it would be less valid. | ||
| But it's very close. | ||
| It's a very close correlation to where people end up. | ||
| And nobody knows how to change disparate IQs. | ||
| Yeah, well, one of the things that you do in your videos that I really like is you often offer your audience a chance to educate you, and you say, send me links, send me some information that might change my opinion on this. | ||
| So I think what we'll do for this episode is we're gonna find a couple articles about this, we'll find something on the Brain Size, we'll find something on Ashkenazi Jews, and all of this stuff, and we'll put it down below, and hopefully we can get some of the conversation going on this. | ||
| Because I think it's just one of those things that, It wades everyone into dangerous territory, and especially these days when everyone's accused of racism endlessly, even if you're trying to find answers to hard questions. | ||
| And I think we actually, I think both of us know we can actually learn a little something from our audience. | ||
| When I watch you do these videos, and I just watched your Syria video that you did the other day, and you said to people, something to the effect of, don't just give me your crazy theory. | ||
| It's not a theory, I want a link. | ||
| I want a paper and some science. | ||
| And I've had, you know, I've had the subject matter experts on my show, the geneticists and the social scientists. | ||
| I've had people who believe that it's almost exclusively environmental on to make the case. | ||
| I've had people who believe that there's some genetic, strong genetic elements and so on. | ||
| So I am Gosh, I mean, it would be, you know, if I could, there are very few theories that would be absolutely fantastic for me to find disproven, you know, because I've got a lot invested in my belief system, as everyone does. | ||
| But boy, if somebody could come along with a way to say, it can be solved through this, or this is the cause, or whatever it is, right? | ||
| I mean, that would be fantastic. | ||
| But right now, the problem, of course, is, and people say to me a lot, and this came up in a conversation, I think, between Sam Harris and Charles Murray. | ||
| Charles Murray was on his show talking about this. | ||
| Well, why do you even want to bring this up? | ||
| Isn't this just going to fuel racists? | ||
| It's an important fact, and we are tortured as a society by group differences. | ||
| I mean, I think that's fairly, I mean, don't you? | ||
| Right, we endlessly talk about group differences. | ||
| Well, they are real, and they're tragic. | ||
| You know, when you look at the average net income of Ashkenazi Jews and you compare it to blacks, it's worlds apart. | ||
| And it's horrible, because if it is just attitude, if it is just racism, that's horrible and needs to be resolved. | ||
| On the other hand, If it is to some degree genetic or for whatever reason it is what it is, like let's say that there's a group of Irish people who didn't get enough to eat and they've ended up being four and a half feet tall, well they're not going to make it in the NBA. | ||
| Now we can say well maybe they're kids and so on, but saying the NBA is prejudiced against These short Irish people, for no reason whatsoever, would be crazy. | ||
| I always thought the NBA was prejudiced against Ashkenazi Jews, but here we are. | ||
| Although you know the history of Jews in basketball, right? | ||
| I know. | ||
| You guys got it going, right? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I mean, that's what I'd rather be doing for a career. | ||
| After the show. | ||
| But the other concern as well, and maybe this comes out of being a parent and so on, and I did weigh, you know, I read the bell curve way back in the day, and I did weigh before, I mean, I don't just Get up and do shows like, hey man, Inspiration Strikes! | ||
| You know, I mean, I did sort of weigh the pros and cons. | ||
| The issue is that if the IQ differences are significantly genetic, it's a tragedy, but it's no one's fault. | ||
| I actually think that if you think, let's say that you think that blacks are exactly the same as Ashkenazi Jews, and the question is why are the blacks failing relative to Jews? | ||
| You could say racism. | ||
| You could say there's something dysfunctional in the black culture. | ||
| You could say whatever, right? | ||
| It's rap music! | ||
| But all of those involve negative judgments about groups, right? | ||
| So either, you know, Jews and whites and East Asians and Hispanics are just horribly racist. | ||
| Well, that's a terrible negative judgment to make about entire groups of society. | ||
| Or you say, well, there's something wrong with the black community, because, you know, you've got these guys from, what was it? | ||
| I think it's Nigeria or something. | ||
| The blacks come over from Nigeria. | ||
| They have a higher per capita income than whites in America. | ||
| So if it's just racism, I mean, physically they're indistinguishable from American blacks. | ||
| A lot of them speak fluent English. | ||
| So if it's just, or, you know, like the great Dr. Tom Sowell, who recently retired, you know, wonderful guy. | ||
| I'm interviewing him in January, I think. | ||
| Oh, you got him! | ||
| Yeah, we're going up to Stanford and doing it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Did you hire Doc the Bounty Hunter to get this guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We did a lot of legwork for the last 2-3 years. | |
| You might recognize me from the closet earlier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to see that. | |
| I'd like to interview you. | ||
| That's why I pulled every favorite onto now. | ||
| Good, no, I'd like to see that. | ||
| So, I mean, he did well, and nobody's sitting there saying, "Oh." | ||
| So, if there is a genetic element involved, or something which is kind of hardened, | ||
| even through environment, that's what we have to work with, | ||
| then saying either somehow there's something wrong with the black community, | ||
| or everyone else is completely racist, involves dumping massively negative judgments | ||
| on entire communities, which if there are genetics involved, | ||
| or other environmental factors that we don't as yet know or can control for, | ||
| it's incredibly bigoted. | ||
| Either against the black community or everyone else for things that are beyond all of our control. | ||
| And that to me is... I don't want people looking down at the black community. | ||
| I don't want everyone saying that we have this magic answer called racism that explains everything because it doesn't. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| And... | ||
| You know, it's different in a way because... Why do you think you're so passionate about this topic particularly? | ||
| Because I was even thinking when I listened to Charles Murray on Sam's podcast and I thought it was a great conversation and obviously as they're doing it you can feel they're wading into things that it's uncomfortable to talk about as we're doing right now. | ||
| But I noticed that immediately after the usual cast of characters and salon, I think, and all the usual nonsense websites, again, just pouring on the accusations of racism and now Sam's a white extremist or whatever just the nonsense is. | ||
| So I think a lot of people just view this as just the opportunity cost on this is just too high to even wade into it. | ||
| But you obviously don't. | ||
| I mean, this is going to sound self-serving. | ||
| I'm aware of this ahead of time, but I'm going to be straight up with you, man. | ||
| I want to solve problems in society. | ||
| I want to fix things in society. | ||
| And I don't, for the life of me, I cannot understand how we fix things by ignoring facts. | ||
| Fundamentally, I cannot understand how we're going to ignore things, how we're going to solve anything by ignoring facts. | ||
| Maybe there is a fix. | ||
| Maybe there is something that can be done. | ||
| I'm sure there is something that can be done. | ||
| But if we don't even acknowledge the problem, how are we going to solve anything? | ||
| And I really, really, I find that the plight of, and it's not just a black community, but the plight of communities around the world and in the Western countries is dire. | ||
| And we are currently tearing ourselves apart as a society, looking for the scapegoats for these group differences. | ||
| And the science is very clear at the moment about what the problem is. | ||
| We don't know, again, all of the causes and so on, but I'm sure we could find it pretty quickly. | ||
| But we are going to self-destruct as a society if we continue to have this incredible witch-hunt for racism and sexism and all kinds of things. | ||
| We're just looking in the wrong place and we're going to tear ourselves apart. | ||
| Because this is not like the difference between the world being flat and the world being round. | ||
| It's not like the difference is the sun or the earth or the sun or the solar system. | ||
| You can be a farmer either way. | ||
| But if this is like our big thing and we are screaming and turning over stones and screaming racism and destroying people's lives and massive government programs designed to fix everything and propagandizing children that their entire history and tearing down statues, everyone's a racist, if it's wrong, We are destroying ourselves through ignorance. | ||
| And that, for the society that we have, and the information technology that we have, and the communications ability we have, for us to self-destruct through ignorance of scientific facts is unprecedented in human history. | ||
| You know, the Roman Empire didn't collapse because they thought the world was flat. | ||
| But if we look at what's going on in Europe and population displacements and movement and so on, if we don't understand the basic science behind what is going on, It matters. | ||
| It really matters about where society is going to go. | ||
| Because if we ignore facts, you know, it's like you've got some weird lump on your body and, oh, I'm not gonna see a doctor, I'm gonna walk it off, you know, I'm sure it's gonna be fine, you know, I'll switch to decaf or everything. | ||
| I'll never switch to decaf, by the way. | ||
| Tumor, I think, is the answer to everything. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, some oil. | ||
| But if you ignore reality, I mean, reality just wipes you out. | ||
| And so I am very passionate about it because, you know, I think, too, you know, I mean, I'm a father, I don't want my daughter growing up with everyone screaming racist at her. | ||
| And they're going to, unless we try and figure out what the facts are. | ||
| Yeah, it's just interesting. | ||
| I mean, I can feel the passion coming out of you when you talk about it. | ||
| It's just interesting, 'cause I see so many people try to wade into this, and then eventually, | ||
| they just are like, I can't do it. | ||
| I don't wanna deal with the blowback. | ||
| But you've put your position out there, and I'm happy to discuss this again in a couple months. | ||
| Well, and again, people, you know, if you can prove me wrong, I am beyond thrilled. | ||
| I will apologize to everyone. | ||
| Although, again, having had all the experts on, I'm on firm ground. | ||
| Again, I'm no scientist, but I've had the scientists on. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a good segue to your book, The Art of the Argument, Western Civilization's Last Stand. | ||
| Now, I had Douglas Murray on. | ||
| Are you familiar with Douglas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah. | |
| So, I had Douglas on about two months ago, and his book is called The Strange Death of Europe. | ||
| So you're both sort of talking about the same thing, but at first what you're talking about here is that we don't even know how to argue properly. | ||
| We don't even know how to have conversations properly. | ||
| It's a good jump off of exactly what you just ended. | ||
| Very well negotiated, very well navigated. | ||
| How about that, huh? | ||
| We almost know what we're doing around here, right? | ||
| What do we do to strengthen, I mean the basic premise of this, what do we do to strengthen our arguments? | ||
| We're always going to have disagreements. | ||
| And the question is, how are we going to resolve them? | ||
| And there's really only two ways. | ||
| We reason or we use force. | ||
| There are only two ways that things get done, things get dealt with. | ||
| The two of us, if we say we want to go to a particular restaurant, we have to submit to where that restaurant is and go in that direction. | ||
| We have to have some way that we subjugate our will to power. | ||
| And the traditional way in the West, post-Socratic, With a few large breaks in between, and we may be in one of them right now, I think we are, has been, okay, if I make a better, more rational argument, if my argument is rational and sound and the premises and blah blah, and the empirical evidence supports me, you agree that we're both submitting to this third party called reality, truth, reason, evidence, right? | ||
| And that way you and I can meet in reality and we can both subject our will to power according to an objective standard. | ||
| Scientists do it, mathematicians do it, engineers do it all the time. | ||
| There's a third standard called, a third party called reality, objectivity, scientific method, whatever, right? | ||
| And we have Lost that third standard. | ||
| The third standard, or the objective standard, used to be religious texts. | ||
| You know, for a long time, under Catholicism, it was what the priest said, what the pope said, that was infallible. | ||
| You know, Martin Luther comes along with the printing press, and it all collapses into the Reformation and religious war, and eventually you get a separation of church and state. | ||
| But if we don't have that third party to adjudicate our disputes, we end up with you and I battling each other like two pieces of paper being pushed together. | ||
| One of us is going to have to buckle under on another one. | ||
| And that's where you get all this bullying, this escalation, this pulling fire alarms, throwing fake blood at people and hitting people with bike locks and so on. | ||
| You get that when people aren't able to find this objective third party to subjugate. | ||
| Their will to power, their will to dominance for, and if we lose that, we lose everything. | ||
| Yeah, so it seems to me that right now we've, you know, everyone knows we've cordoned ourselves off these days and because of social media you only follow news sources that catered away on. | ||
| So, but if we can't agree on basic facts, which really is what you're talking about, we can only do the dance of logic and reason and really arguing your point if we can agree on some basic principles. | ||
| We seem to be veering into territory right now where we can't agree on that. | ||
| Do you think there's a way to correct that? | ||
| Before we get to, you know, it's the stuff before the argument. | ||
| I mean, you know, I had a caller in to my show recently, a black guy called into the show. | ||
| We had a great conversation and he was saying that there's lots of people in his community who genuinely believe that Mike Brown was shot execution style in the back by a racist cop. | ||
| and he wasn't. Spoiler, he wasn't. It's very well established. | ||
| And so if there are groups who have these beliefs and there are other groups who have more accurate or | ||
| empirical beliefs, people have to submit their preferences to objectivity. | ||
| I mean, I'm a universalist. | ||
| This is the philosophy gig, right? | ||
| You have to come up with universals that people are willing to submit to. | ||
| Because, you know the old thing, nature to be controlled must be obeyed. | ||
| If you just make up your own standards of gravity, you're not going to get very far. | ||
| But we do have to passionately commit ourselves to submission. | ||
| Because right now, I don't know if you've ever had this in your life. | ||
| I've had people in my life where I don't. | ||
| I didn't want to submit to them because it felt like a personal loss, you know, like a personal, oh, I'm going to win. | ||
| And when I sort of relax and say, OK, well, I have these positions, but they're based on recent evidence and I don't lose if somebody It teaches me something better. | ||
| I win, right? | ||
| I mean, if you go in the wrong way and you stop someone and say, oh, you've got to go the other way, you don't say, you're contradicting me, you bastard! | ||
| You say, well, good, now I get to go where I want to go. | ||
| But we have to have those objective standards. | ||
| And back to where we started. | ||
| Dave, we have atheists who are not, I think, focusing as hard as they could on bringing forward these objective standards. | ||
| Atheists, again, should be all over the race and IQ stuff, because that's science as far as we know it at the moment, but they don't, and I think social conflicts escalate thereby. | ||
| Yeah, so if we can't agree on the facts, but we can make...then isn't there like this really crazy...it's almost as if society is going to split in two in a weird way. | ||
| Two? | ||
| Or it'll split a gajillion ways, but I think... That's like saying the Death Star at the end of Star Wars just had a change of direction. | ||
| That's where we go, right? | ||
| Are you a Star Wars guy? | ||
|
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I am. | |
| We could do Star Wars. | ||
| I bought the album when I was a kid. | ||
| The original LP? | ||
| I have it in the green room there. | ||
| I found the original LP on the streets of New York City. | ||
| I bought it for three bucks like ten years ago. | ||
| It's the original 1977 LP. | ||
| That was my one. | ||
| And the poster that I have in there next to the makeup thing is the poster that came in it, which I didn't know I had until about a year ago when I moved and it fell out of the thing. | ||
| Yeah, I listened to that and loved it because this is back before VCRs and all this kind of stuff and that was the only way you could enjoy it was to close your eyes and Imagine. | ||
| Oh, I would have given for a lightsaber. | ||
| I've got a lightsaber, too. | ||
| No, but it's not one that can take down a telephone pole, so, you know. | ||
| I'm working on that. | ||
| We could do Star Wars all day, but we've just gone back. | ||
| That the real rift here, yes, there's going to be a rift of like a thousand different cracks and we're all going to go in different directions. | ||
| But that the rift will be the people that wanna have an argument, whether they agree or not. | ||
| So let's, you know, we could probably sit here for the rest of the day and find 10 things we disagree on, but we'd do it civilly and we'd, you know, if you made a point, I'd concede it and I think you'd do the same thing and all that. | ||
| So we'll have that set of people, but then we're gonna have the larger set of people that just can't agree, that can't agree on the facts. | ||
| So it's like, we'll have this good faith group that's gonna be doing, It's gonna be a small group, but intellectually powerful and rigorous, but then everyone else that unfortunately just can't even get out of that world. | ||
| So it's sort of like we have to give these people a bit of a lifeboat or something. | ||
| I think that's sort of why we both do what we do, I suppose. | ||
| Well, this is, you know, like this book, I mean, I'm hugely influenced, of course, by Socrates, and what does Socrates do? | ||
| He didn't take a PhD sitting in an ivory tower and talk about the ethics of the Babylonians, right? | ||
| I mean, Socrates went down into the marketplace and talked to people about what mattered to them. | ||
| That's the reason I do a call-in show for like three or four hours a week, because I want to talk to people and find out How philosophy can help them, and what they're struggling with, and what matters to them. | ||
| And right at the beginning of the book, by the way, you mentioned, you know, you say that basically this isn't some academic paper that's just like some flimsy nonsense, which we see this now all the time. | ||
| These academic papers that get peer-reviewed, and they're the most ridiculous. | ||
| Peterson, you just had on Joe Peterson, he was saying that 80% of papers in social sciences never get cited once. | ||
| Not once. | ||
| They just, the library has to buy them, they stick them in a shelf somewhere, and... Kind of makes me wish I went into academia. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| I know it does, but no, it doesn't need that kind of futility, right? | ||
| That shadow lens thing. | ||
| You ever see the movie Shadow Lens? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, it's a great bit. | ||
| It's a fantastic movie, but Anthony Hopkins, playing an academic, is talking to some other one and he says, don't you ever get this feeling of ultimate futility? | ||
| And I was like, well, of course. | ||
| Yeah, but no, I wanted to write a colloquial book on First of all, you have to tell people why it's important because everyone has this negative view of arguments Like what do you think of you think of some bickering couple? | ||
| Mm-hmm Like oh man, I remember this popped into my head just now many years ago. | ||
| I worked after high school I wanted to save money to go to college and I worked gold panning prospecting and I call this really rough stuff up north stuff and I remember staying in a It's a bit of a rude story, but I remember staying in a lodge and hearing this horrible old married Bickerton couple screaming at each other. | ||
| And it got to the point where the man was like, yeah, well, your sister gives better blowjobs than you! | ||
| And I was like, oh! | ||
| I'd rather be in the woods. | ||
| Like, I'll take a bear over this kind of human. | ||
| And we think of this, like, you know, this Bickerton stuff, this maneuvering. | ||
| You see this online all the time. | ||
| People won't give up their positions. | ||
| They inflame, they ad hominem, all this kind of stuff. | ||
| And so I wanted to Give people a more positive flavor of arguments, a more positive flavor of debate, that it's a chance to be informed, it's a chance to learn, it's a chance to sharpen your skills in verbal debate. | ||
| And that is civilization. | ||
| Civilization starts, we put down the club and we use our words. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's no Plan C. There's a club, there's your words, and that's it. | ||
| There's nothing else. | ||
| We've got no backup plan. | ||
| There's no Plan C. That's it. | ||
| That's all we have. | ||
| And when you see aggression and coercion escalating in society, which we see online, bullying and aggression and all that, we see with the expanding state trying to solve every conceivable problem we have in the known universe, because the state is coercion. | ||
| It's an agency of force. | ||
| And that's because Force rushes in where words fail to tread. | ||
| And this is why, OK, I'll talk about controversial issues because I know that the alternative is if I back off and you back off and other people back off from controversial issues, it's not like, well, everyone just said, OK, well, we're not going to deal with them at all. | ||
| What happens is then people who are sophists and the violence mongers, they come in instead and they start telling everyone what to do at the point of a gun. | ||
| And that's not good. | ||
| Yeah, and that's really exactly why I wanted to return the favor and have you on my show and not just do your show, because... | ||
| Whether every argument you made here was perfect, and as you said, you're not a scientist, and you're open to those challenges, that this is the only thing that's gonna get us out of this craziness. | ||
| So if I'm afraid of taking some heat for having you on, or if you're afraid of having some heat for having Peterson on, or whatever it is, and I don't even mean you in this case so specifically, but any of these people, if we all get afraid of talking to each other, then it's really, the jig is up. | ||
| The only thing I'm afraid of about having Jordan Peterson on my show is that I'm gonna look like an idiot. | ||
| Because the man is so supernaturally intelligent, I'm basically just holding his train daintily. | ||
| I believe that the top comment on my interview with him from last week was, Dave, you're an idiot. | ||
|
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You have to have some humility to be around that. | |
| Listen, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| I hope we'll do this again because there's obviously so much more that we can get into. | ||
| All right, for more on Stefan, you can find him right here on YouTube. |
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