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Dec. 10, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:34
6 Morality Is Not Easy - Surviving the Cynics

A response to those who say that moral/political theories are a waste of time

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Hi, this is the second of my impromptu podcasts.
I guess these are a little different than the ones where I read a pre-prepared article.
But what I'm aiming to do here is to talk about issues that are coming up in my email conversations with people and, of course, my own thoughts to try and figure out how we can move this agenda of freedom and non-violence forward in the world.
One of the things that I've been having an interesting conversation with somebody online, whose first name is John, is the question that he has is basically what do you do with people who, either through cultural bias or just their own irrationality, don't accept any arguments for individuality.
You know, certain Oriental or Asian cultures believe that the group is everything and the individual is nothing and so on.
And what do you do with that?
And my reply to him was to say, this is quoted from an email that I sent to him, without a doubt, Those who are irrational cannot be reasoned with, and that is fine.
They can be irrational all they want, they just cannot claim to be rational as well.
I may choose to believe in horoscopes, but I can't call that belief scientific.
And his response to that is, but you seem to define anyone who will not accept our moral axioms as, quote, irrational.
Unfortunately, I suspect that is the vast majority of the human race.
If the vast majority are not able to be convinced by your argument, it doesn't matter how, quote, right it is, it still fails its objective, which is to change the direction of human history towards freedom.
Now, this is an objection that I have heard and, you know, frankly been enormously irritated by for many, many years.
And the argument is something like this.
I or somebody puts forward a theoretical or logical framework to prove that the only valid morality is a morality of non-violence or proves a moral argument or some sort of conceptual framework that is abstract, syllogistically based, philosophically based and the reply that we always get back
always, mostly, let's just say always, because it's almost, I think one or two people in my life have not given me this argument back, which is I put forward a sort of tightly reasoned and I think fairly well thought out framework for approaching the question of morality.
And people come back and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, that's all well and good.
That's a nice, interesting, logical framework.
But basically, so what?
You know, the fact is, we can talk all we want, and we don't change one single government regulation.
We don't change one single state law.
You know, we've been talking and talking and talking for the last 50, 80, 100 years, 150 years, if you count classical liberalism.
And the government keeps growing, blah, blah, blah.
So it doesn't matter what the theory is.
What really matters is that we find a way to convince people.
Now, frankly, I think this is a terrible, ludicrous, and almost contemptible position.
And I'll tell you why.
I mean, I don't want to sound overly harsh, because, you know, there is this idea that if we're all working in the same direction, then we should all be helping each other.
And, I mean, I sort of... I frankly don't care about any of that stuff, to be perfectly honest.
You know, the important thing is, is it true?
I mean, is what we're arguing for true?
Is freedom morally valid?
Is capitalism, i.e.
the free market, is it a valid proposition?
Is it true?
I mean, we're trying to establish something that is a fact, not an opinion, right?
So when this guy, John, says, but you seem to define anyone who will not accept our moral axioms as irrational, and therefore that's the vast majority of the human race, and blah blah blah, He's basically taking something that I take great issue, which is the argument from effect.
So, John is saying, well look, no matter how logical you are, the majority of human beings, the vast majority of human beings, are irrational.
And therefore, it doesn't matter how rational you are, we need to find a way to convince people who are irrational.
And then when I say, well, you can't convince people who are irrational, all you can do is simply say, look, you're irrational.
And, by the way, by being irrational, you can't claim any moral validity to your pronouncements.
Then he says, well, yeah, okay, fine, that's theoretical, but still people won't believe us.
And that, to me, seems completely ridiculous and puts us in an impossible situation.
The impossible situation is We can only convince people, we should only be trying to convince people, if we are right.
Not just because we like the idea of freedom, or that's how we were raised, or we read Atlas Shrugged and had an epiphany.
I mean, none of that means anything.
The only way that you can logically or validly try and change somebody else's mind is if you're in fact correct.
I mean, if I try to convince you that, you know, the color blue is the best color ever, and I get angry if you don't agree with me, obviously that's irrational.
If I try and convince you that 2 plus 2 is 4, if you reject, you know, the numbers, numbers don't exist, logic doesn't follow, A is not A, whatever, right?
Then all I do is say, well look, you're just being irrational, and you cease the conversation.
There's nothing you can say to people who are irrational.
Those two are enormously different situations.
So, if we take as our position that freedom is just nice, or efficient, or better, or whatever, but not true, not morally valid, not logically provable, then we are absolutely wrong in trying to change people to our way of thinking.
I mean, if I'm a scientist and I come up with a theory, it's not... I don't try and convince people because I like my theory, or it's kind of efficient, or it's sort of better than what they believe, or it will benefit them to believe it.
I try and convince people of my theory because it is true, because it is logical, because it is well-argued, because it is empirically verifiable, and it is reproducible, and it predicts the future.
Not because I like it, but because it is true.
And my basic argument for anybody who's been following my Lew Rockwell articles, my basic argument is that because we have failed or been unwilling to address this central issue of logical morality, that is why we have failed so incredibly badly for the past couple of generations.
I mean, we have failed as a movement in ways that It's hard to imagine other movements that have failed as badly as we have.
We've been arguing, let's just say, von Mises wrote his first works in the 1920s, disproving the validity of government intervention, predicting the failure of communism and socialism, predicting the wild oscillations that come about from government intervention in a free market.
It wasn't long after that that Hayek and von Mises wrote about the causes of the Great Depression and the economic circumstances that the government pursued that prolonged it and all of that.
I mean this stuff's all been proven for generations already and nobody listens to us.
We've had absolutely no effect in injecting ourselves into the general public debate.
Strong belief, and I think I've reasoned it out, and I think that there's lots of empirical proof.
My strong belief as to why we have failed is that the world does not run on efficiency.
The world runs on right and wrong.
The world runs on morality.
The world does not run on economic efficiency.
The world does not run on arguments from consistency.
The world does not run on the fact that the free market is going to give you better income and blah blah blah blah blah.
The world runs on what is considered right and what is considered wrong.
If the people believe that the government programs are morally right, they will support them no matter what the evidence.
If the people believe that the free market is morally wrong, or at best, amoral, then they will reject its unfettered expansion.
They will reject the free market.
This is all very well understood by our enemies.
I mean, the Iraq war was sold on the basis of morality.
Saddam Hussein is a bad guy.
He participated in 9-11.
He's got weapons of mass destruction.
He gassed his own people.
He lied to the UN.
He fails to follow resolutions.
He kicked out the weapons inspectors.
But these are all moral arguments.
He's a bad guy.
They're not arguments from efficiency.
The price of oil will go down if we invade Iraq.
Nobody cares about that.
And nobody cares that the price of oil is going to go down in a free market.
They don't care that they're going to make more money.
And we know that because we've been arguing those positions for generations and they've got us precisely nowhere.
And the last thing I'll say about the argument from sort of practicality that people believe things that are practical or will change their minds based on practical considerations, well...
Let's have a look at the question of religion.
And what we'll do is we'll take Islam, although this could equally be applied to flavors of Christianity and Zoroastrianism and Rastafarianism and all the other gobbledygook that clogs up people's brains.
But let's just have a look at Islam because it's a foreign religion to most of us, of course, so it's a little easier to view it objectively.
So, this gentleman says that That people need to be convinced by something that is practical.
That we need to find ways to convince people that the free market is more practical and will benefit them.
And that's how we're going to win.
Forget about arguing for morality and logical frameworks or anything like that.
Forget about abstract or obtuse arguments.
Just go for the gut and get them where they live and tell them they'll make more money or whatever, right?
But if we look at something like Islam, I mean, can anybody sit there and point out to me or to anybody else what is practical about Islam or Christianity?
I mean, if I sat you down and I said, look, I've got this great thing that I want to convince people of, and let's say that this was a completely atheistic society, right?
Nobody believes in any religion.
I sat you down and I said, this is my approach.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell people that some incomprehensible, unknowable being with no physical dimension and all-powerful omnipotence created and runs the world secretly and there's saints and gods and devils and then I'm going to call it monotheistic and then I'm going to break God into Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Trinity in one and
I'm going to have an immaculate conception and I'm going to have miracles and loaves to fishes and I'm going to ask that people in the 21st century organize their moral beliefs and their modes of living based on the writings of half-starved monks who were hallucinating 2,500 years ago that have written in ancient Aramaic and had it translated umpteen times and mistranslated umpteen more times and that's what I'm going to convince the world of.
Would you seriously look me in the eye and say, yeah, that makes sense, because people respond to what is practical.
There's nothing more impractical than the idea of religion, let alone things like nationalism and the draft and war and so on.
But let's just talk about religion.
There's nothing more impractical than the idea of religion.
And furthermore, I would say that the moral teachings of the religion that I'm proposing are things like no sex before marriage, You've got to baptize your children.
You can't masturbate.
Every natural impulse that your body has, you have to fight.
You have to go and sit in a little box with another guy and tell him everything that you've done wrong.
You have to donate money.
You have to donate time.
You have to dress up on Sundays.
You have to give a tithe.
I mean, all of these things are wildly impractical.
But people believe them and they follow them.
And why?
Because they believe it's moral.
So, I'm going to move on to another little bit of his email here, which I think is also very instructive.
And I certainly don't blame him for having these opinions.
I mean, they're so common that to blame them would be foolish, but they are, I think, very instructive.
So his particular argument then goes on.
He had a Malaysian friend who said, well the group is everything and the individual is nothing and blah blah blah.
So I said to him, your friend from Malaysia has to answer the following.
Does the group actually exist?
If so, where can it be touched?
If the group does not exist, then nothing exists but individuals.
Therefore, any morality predicated on the existence of a group is false.
And he replied, You are missing my point.
The Malaysian guys, and in truth most peoples, moral axioms do not require that the group exist, just as the physical object moral law does not need to exist for the abstract concept to be valid.
He can arbitrarily choose any group and say it validates his axioms.
The Chinese have been ingraining that into their people for thousands of years.
They are quite good at it.
The point of an argument is not to prove yourself right to yourself, but to another person.
If the other person will not accept your proof for any reason, it doesn't matter how irrational he is or how wrong, what is important is that he is unconvinced.
It is for this reason that I do not believe arguing from any basis will ever work on the large scale, not by itself anyway.
We must use the argument from self-interest.
It is not enough to convince people that the current system is wrong and another right.
You must also offer them a real, solid, existing alternative.
If the right system is just theoretical, you will likely get the classic father-in-law response, that's just the way things are.
Henry Ford and the other automotive industry pioneers did not argue that, quote, horseless carriages were more efficient or moral or whatever than horses.
They built effective cheap transportation devices and people converted.
Ditto with airplanes and electric lights and computers etc.
Quote, if you build it, they will come.
So that's his particular approach to how it is that you change somebody's mind about the argument for morality.
Now the first thing that I would like to, and not to pick on him, but you know these are just ideas to discuss, the first thing that I'd like to talk about is his quote which says, the point of an argument is not to prove yourself right to yourself, but to another person.
Now, the problem that I have with this is that I would argue, and pretty strongly too, that the point of an argument is neither to prove yourself right to yourself or to another person, but in relation to reality.
I mean, if I say that an object falls at an accelerating rate of 9.8 meters per second per second, which is one of the basic laws of gravity, then the point of that is not to prove it to myself, or to prove it to another person, or my dog, or God, or anything.
The purpose of that is to validate that against the facts, the empirical facts of reality, and the logical requirement for consistency.
So, it's absolutely irrelevant whether somebody else accepts the truth of an argument or not.
Absolutely irrelevant!
If I say, rocks fall, and somebody else doesn't believe that rocks fall, They still fall!
I may have never heard of the concept of gravity.
If I jump off a cliff I think I know where I'm going to end up.
Now the idea that we can argue for self-interest is complete nonsense.
Nobody's self-interest is particularly served by volunteering for an army or being drafted into an army or paying fifty percent of taxes to increase the national debt to cripple the economy for their children.
Or to follow religious tenets that cause complete neurosis within the personality, or any of these things.
Self-interest is absolutely not at the basis of most human decisions.
Or if it is, then the self-interest is entirely concerned around morality.
If you get someone to believe that something is right, they have no defense, none whatsoever, against you enforcing that against them.
They may fight, they may groan, they may grumble, however, they will always, always end up folding.
And let's think about it in your own life.
What you consider to be the good is what you will automatically end up doing, sooner or later, whether you fuss and fight or whatever, because what is right and wrong is the greatest lever in the history of the world.
And that's what you get.
Everybody concedes that the free market is efficient, but they also say that, you know, the poor will starve, the old will die, the sick will will ale into oblivion, and so on.
It's always moral arguments that you hear.
The idea that You know, the free market is more efficient in the way that the car was more efficient than horses.
Therefore, we convince people of its efficiency and they will change their minds ignores the basic, for me, the basic fact of social reality.
First of all, we have been making that argument for the past couple of generations, and it has completely, utterly, and totally failed.
And that's something we've got to stare at in the face and try and figure out why.
You know, if you keep doing the same thing, you will continue to get the same results.
We have absolutely proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, both theoretically, empirically, predictably, however you want to put it, we have absolutely and completely proven that the free market is more efficient, That socialism, fascism and communism produce economic disasters and the loss of individual freedoms.
You know, everybody knows the fact that there's a huge national debt, that the government in the US passes about a hundred thousand regulations every year.
All of these things completely incontrovertible.
Everybody knows all of that.
But we still haven't budged a single regulation or even slowed down the growth of the government.
So arguing from efficiency and self-interest doesn't work.
It hasn't worked.
It's been tried.
I think we've given it eighty or so years, which is not too bad a lab to figure out what the best approach is.
And it's completely and utterly failed.
So let's not talk anymore about how we can just prove to people that things are more efficient and they will change their minds.
The basic fact of social interaction, and the reason why people are so resistant to the idea of changing their moral beliefs, is that if you change your moral beliefs fundamentally and start putting them into practice, Everything in your life is going to fall apart.
And I say this from both a logical understanding of the matter and some fairly intense personal experience, which I can sort of dip into here if it's of interest to anybody.
The reason that it's going to change logically is that One of the basic moralities in the world, as everybody knows, is your family is good, family must stick together, family this, so you love him like a brother, sisters should stick together.
You know, your mom didn't mean it when she said something bad, your dad didn't know it, or whatever, they did the best they could, blah blah blah.
And I hear this not only from people that I talk to about with family, but also of course my wife, who practices psychology, hears this all the time from her patients.
You know, people who have the most horrendously acting parents will still find any excuse to forgive them and to continue because, well gosh, don't you know family is good?
And of course the government is good, and so If you start to change your ethics, and I'll talk about this briefly in sort of my personal experience, that I've been a libertarian in theory or objectivist in theory for probably a little over two decades.
I'm 39 years old.
And I guess it was around five or six years ago for a number of reasons, which I can either never get into or get it to another time.
I began to really live my beliefs.
I began to no longer accept it when people would say Well, freedom isn't that important.
The free market doesn't matter.
Non-violence, basically, who cares?
I'm willing to use violence to help the poor.
And even after I proved to them that it didn't help the poor, or at least it helped only the worst poor in the short run, they continued to have their beliefs.
And so basically I said, look, if you continue to advocate everything that I find morally repugnant, then we have a problem.
We have a real problem in our relationship.
So I was perfectly willing to be out-argued.
I was perfectly willing to accept any evidence to the contrary or any logical evidence to the contrary.
But what I was no longer willing to do was to just say, OK, well, potato, potato, let's agree to disagree.
You have your opinion.
I have mine.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion.
Because it's not true.
Everybody is emphatically not entitled to their opinion because there is such a thing as objective truth, morality, and reality.
I'm not entitled to an opinion that rocks fall upwards.
I mean, I can have it, but I'm absolutely wrong.
So what happened was that my business associates, I was in business with my brother and Another gentleman.
That completely fell apart.
I stopped seeing my family.
I stopped seeing my extended family.
I broke up with my then-girlfriend who I'd been seeing for about seven years and living with for two.
Most of my friendships in the period since have fallen away and, you know, the only consolation that I have is a magnificent one or two remaining friendships and, you know, an unbelievable relationship with my beautiful, beautiful wife.
And that is, you know, more than makes up for all of the nonsense that I got rid of before.
Now, I'm a pretty diplomatic fellow.
I don't raise my voice, really.
I don't yell at people.
I can be emphatic, but I'm always open to being contradictive.
I mean, I'm just trying to find the truth, right?
I mean, the truth is out there in empirical reality and logic, so anybody gives me evidence of the contrary or a better logical argument or points out a flaw in my argument, I'm all ears.
I mean, I absolutely will listen and enjoy it, and I love talking about this stuff.
I do get impatient with people who don't know how to think, who claim that they do, but, you know, I'm also patient with that because it wasn't like it took me two days to figure out how to think.
So, if you're going to say to someone, like if you're going to say to a Catholic, there's no such thing as God, and you are going to convince that person, and also that it's immoral to believe in God, and I know that I haven't proven that argument, but let's just say, for the sake that it's true,
Then what is that Catholic going to have to do if they say, well, you know what, Catholicism is morally wrong and to believe in things just because I'm told them and bullied into believing them and frightened with things like hell is not a good approach.
And in fact, those who did bully me and continue to bully me into believing something that is not true based on threats and the threat of hell and social ostracism are also not good people because you should not bully people into believing stuff.
What's that Catholic guy gonna do?
Well, he's gonna have to stop attending church.
Right?
He's gonna have to sit his children down and say, uh, so sorry, daddy made a slight error, and there is no God, and by the way, Catholicism Which I told you to believe in, and which everybody around you tells you is the best thing, the only decent way to be, and the only moral existence, is completely false.
And everyone I told you was good is bad, everything I told you was right is wrong, and everything I told you was moral is in fact immoral.
And what are his children going to do?
Well, his children are friends with other religious children.
So what are they going to do?
Are they going to say, well, you know what?
My daddy now says that God does not exist and that the church is bad and corrupt.
And that everything that we thought is right is wrong and blah blah blah.
Well, of course, then they're not going to be able to play with those other children anymore.
In fact, there's going to be not just social ostracism, but unbelievable levels of hostility, right?
Because whenever you point out the truth to people, they tend to get very upset if they feel threatened by it, which, you know, because most people believe false things, they do.
And then, how is that Catholic, who now sees the truth, how is that Catholic then going to deal with his parents?
Is he going to say to his mom and dad, You know, you put me in Sunday school.
You told me this was right and wrong.
You threatened me with hell.
I mean, what is he going to say?
Is he going to convince his parents that, yes, there is no God and the church is wrong and, you know, that fealty to religion is corrupting influence?
Well, of course, he's going to have a rather tough time doing that.
And his siblings and so on.
And let's say that the people at his work are also religious.
Right?
I mean, is he going to say, well, you know, I've changed my mind when they say, how did you enjoy the sermon on Sunday?
Is he going to say, well, I don't go anymore because I, you know, I've now come to understand that there is no such thing as God and that the church is a corrupt social institution that, you know, harms children and, you know, destroys independent thought and so on.
He may refrain from saying any of that.
And then he's put in the uncomfortable position of either pretending that he went to church or evading Any kinds of questions about all of this?
I'm simply saying all of this because when you ask people to change their ethical position, you are asking them to give up their friends, their family, their community, the respect of their children, possibly their marriage.
I mean, let's not even talk about what happens to this Catholic guy when he decides that there is no God and tells his wife, and not to be gender specific, it could be the other way around, Right?
Honey, not only have I taught the children that what is right is actually wrong, but you have also participated in this corruption.
And then she has the problem of her parents and her church community and her friends and her extended family and everything.
I mean, people are so incredibly enmeshed and embedded in moral viewpoints.
That getting them out of it, out of those moral viewpoints, is almost completely impossible.
The same thing that has happened to me has also happened to my wife.
She now no longer sees her sister.
She no longer sees her mother and father.
She no longer has any contact with her extended family.
And with one exception, with whom she does not talk about ideas of any kind, all of her friends have rejected her.
Why?
Because she's curious about the truth and she's not willing to take rote answers.
So the fact of the matter is that everybody is completely embedded in a moral viewpoint and a social community.
If you attempt to change their minds, you will face incredible opposition, hostility, ostracism, because you are asking them to give up everything.
That they consider to be of value.
Friends, family, community.
And you're also saying that if they have children, that they have done enormous harm to their children.
So the idea that we can just sell people a better car misses the central fact of human life.
Which is that people relate to each other on the basis of what they consider to be the good.
They don't have to be philosophers.
They don't have to be abstract thinkers.
They don't have to be intellectuals.
They just, in their gut, get that what they consider to be the community is the good.
And if you question it, you are absolutely thrown out into the snowbank and the whole community will just drive right by.
So, the last thing that I'd like to mention here is, you know, the question that I was just chatting about with my wife when we were out doing some errands.
And the question is this.
Why are people so focused on or contemptuous of or disdainful of the argument for morality?
Well, of course, this is something that I've already talked about, that they're enmeshed in this sort of social murk or social swamp and they can't fight their way free without enormous personal cost, the kind of personal cost that makes divorce pale into non-trauma.
And I think that the reason why people like John have such a problem with a rational empirical argument is that most people, of course, don't think.
It's not because they're dumb, it's just because they're taught, actively taught, to never think.
And so when I propose an axiomatic series of logical statements that are not that difficult to understand, right, I mean the idea that if you have a moral rule it should be consistent to everyone, it does not require that you have an advanced degree in astrophysics to process it, right?
But the reason that they get hostile towards this and sort of jump into this jittery and skittish world of, oh yeah, well what if people don't believe us and blah blah blah, right?
Is because I think that what we call identity, what we call having a self, what we call having a soul, is to me entirely dependent upon the capacity to think for yourself.
I mean, if all you do is parrot what everybody else believes, and of course if all they've done is parrot what has always been believed, it's not entirely clear to me how you could actually be said to have an identity, a being, a self.
Saying what other people believe is nonsense.
It's not saying anything that's true.
It's not saying anything that's original.
It's not you processing your own experiences and your own empiricism and your own logic.
It's just, you know, repeating yourself.
I mean, to say that believing what other people believe gives you an identity is like saying that a photocopier is exactly the same as an artist.
So, I think what happens when people are faced with an original argument that doesn't smell or taste like anything that they've talked about or seen before, then what is required for them is to think and evaluate and understand that argument, that new argument.
Now, in order to do that, they have to be able to think and evaluate on their own, and of course, they can't!
Now, I can't sail a boat, but I'm not threatened by that, because, you know, that's not a central part of my identity.
But since I think it's true that to be able to think and evaluate on your own is what we call having an identity, if somebody is faced with a new argument, what it does is it pokes around in that very empty, scary, and dangerous place within them that knows that they don't have an identity, that they don't have a soul, that they don't have You know, what I would call a personality.
That they're simply a big bucket which has been full for a variety of reasons or filled for a variety of reasons with other people's opinions.
So, you know, maybe they have a problem with authority, and so they're drawn towards libertarianism, or maybe their father was a union leader, so they're left-wing, or who knows?
Maybe they saw a film about unions when they were a kid, and, no, I sympathize with the poor.
But it's all just nonsense.
It's all just a random grab bag of experience and emotional impressions and history and prejudice.
It's not actually being able to think, and most people can't think.
They just manipulate symbols like, you know, socialism helps the poor, you know, dog-eat-dog capitalism, and rugged individualism.
These are just symbols that people just manipulate, and they mean nothing, because they can't think about them in any kind of rational or consistent manner.
So when somebody like John, and you know, certainly if I'm wrong, I apologize to whoever this person is in advance, but I don't think I'm wrong.
You know, when John is faced with an argument, he doesn't know how to respond to it.
And not knowing how to respond to it is exactly the same as realizing that he does not have an identity, that he does not have a self, that he does not have a personality, that all he does is parrot what everybody else says.
And that is terrifying, to stare into that kind of void of identity, to stare into that kind of emptiness, and that kind of conformity, and to realize that by claiming to be somebody who thinks, you've been a hypocrite your whole life, because it's fine to not think, but you've got to be honest about not thinking, like if I don't know how to sail a boat, I should be honest about it.
To stare into that kind of void and to realize that if you accept that you can't think and don't have an identity and start taking steps towards learning how to think and developing an identity, that your entire social circle will fall away from you and you will be rejected and scorned and ostracized for the rest of your life.
Well, not too pleasant a prospect.
I mean, the only consolation is the truth, and that your remaining relationships will be rich in a way that you can't imagine right now.
But I really think that's a particular problem that, when you take the argument for morality and consistency, that you will face.
So when he wanted to know what my particular argument was for morality, and so I sent it to him, And he said, I loved it, too bad few will ever read it the whole way through, and fewer still will understand and agree.
He said, loved it, but it's too bad nobody will believe it.
Which to me is completely irrelevant.
I mean, I'm not saying, do you like my poem?
I'm saying, are these arguments true?
And saying, loved it, but nobody agrees, is not exactly a response, right?
I mean, if Einstein sends me the theory of relativity, and I'm supposed to be a physicist, and he says, is this valid?
I can say, well, this logical step is incorrect, or this is inconsistent, or this, you know, contradicts this experimental data.
Fantastic.
But if he says, oh, I love this theory of relativity, I just don't know how many people are going to agree with it.
I would probably write him back and say, well, thanks for nothing.
You're not giving me anything useful.
Your particular opinion of it, of the piece, is irrelevant.
The question is, is it true or is it false?
All right, well, I guess that's what came out of that email from me and out of some conversations with my wife, who, of course, I would absolutely love to thank for reviewing these.
these podcasts.
I certainly hope that they're enjoyable to you, the listener.
I think that having sort of stewed on these topics for many many years, I guess I've synthesized a few things that I believe are true and I believe they're strong proof for.
So I hope that they're helpful and certainly the last thing that I will say is that you really have to, if you're looking at taking this argument for morality and you're looking at examining and poking around And the infrastructure of ethics, which underpins and runs all of society, like certain basic physical laws underpin and run all of material reality, just be aware of what you're going to get into.
As soon as you start bringing up logical and moral consistencies with people, as soon as you start to actually live in a way that conforms with objective morality, You absolutely will face the kind of condemnation, indifference, scorn, contempt, derision, everything that you can imagine because To take a metaphorical view, and as you probably know I'm an atheist, there are some very powerful devils that are embedded in the hearts and minds of people.
They are not going to give up without a fight.
The false morals of this world, which so many people profit from, are not going to be relinquished without a fight.
So if you're going to get into it and start mixing it up at this level, I absolutely encourage you to do it.
It is an incredible way to spend your life.
It is a powerful and exciting way that is incredibly satisfying.
But, you know, you really do have to have a strong stomach.
You need to decompress and you need to recognize the depth and power of the ideas that you are facing down.
And it's actually a lot more of an exorcism than it is an argument.
So I hope that this is motivating.
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