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Dec. 24, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:04
28 The Economics of Spirituality

The economic drivers of religion

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Well, good evening my charming listeners and a very, very Merry Christmas to you.
This will definitely be a slow-moving podcast because I've been stunned and slowed down by my wife's fabulous Christmas cooking and I'm sitting on the couch with the microphone poised on my belly.
In a way that would be rather difficult if I hadn't just had a lovely and large meal.
So I'm sure we're all in the same sort of situation when it comes to Christmas.
So I hope that you had a great time and I hope that you enjoyed it and that the material Elf Called Santa was very good to you.
So there's a couple of topics that have sort of been on my mind and I had a great chat with my wife about one of these while we were out for a walk today.
So I think it's probably worth recording the thoughts before they fade from mind or fade from view.
But just before that, something sort of interesting is on one of my podcasts got a review Uh, from somebody who said something like, um, you know, that it's, it's, it's very articulate and very rational.
Um, but from a distance his tone seems violent until you recognize it's just, uh, you know, that it's my drive to find out the truth.
And I sort of found that very interesting that people find that my tone sounds violent.
And, you know, I myself am a pacifist, so I do find it interesting that people find something that I'm doing violent.
And I'm guessing that it has something to do with the, I guess, I mean, things make me angry and there's a tone that comes into my voice when I am angry at, you know, say, you know, a religion that cancels that I be sort of put to death.
How's that for a Christmas thought?
So I guess people do find that, I guess some people do find passion or anger equals violence which, you know, I think is actually quite a flaw or a problem in people's approach to something like libertarianism or the defense of the free market or rationality and so on because
I mean, I'm not really sure why the emotional energy and the passion of causes should be entirely reserved for, you know, cheap Sunday preachers and, you know, false politicians and so on.
I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with getting roused up and passionate in defense of freedom.
If all of our enemies can sort of thunder from the pulpit and shake with sweat and have their voices spiral up to heights of oratorical grandeur and passion, I don't see why we should entirely cede the field of, not exactly theatrics, but certainly of passion.
To our enemies.
So I would certainly say that, you know, if things get you angry then, you know, that's something that should be expressed and not something that we should sort of choke back for the sake of appearing, quote, rational.
Because, you know, the human emotions are an integral part of life and an incredibly informative source of information about living.
I mean, I certainly go with some of the Randian theories of emotionality, that emotions are sort of summed up value judgments about large amounts of information or experience.
And, you know, having seen the growth of the state and the falsehood of those in power for 20 or 30, well I guess 20 odd years for myself, I think that those who fight for freedom have a right to be angry and those who are pacifists have a right to be angry at the increasing use and acceptance of violence in the modern world and I think that passion
in defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.
I'm not the first one to come up with that but I think it's worth remembering and it may be something that you might want to explore.
We all feel very passionate about these ideas and they're not the easiest ideas in the world to hold and passion can be a great way of getting these ideas across in a way that energizes people rather than lectures them.
So that's sort of one comment that I got that I thought was very interesting.
Another comment or series of comments that I've gotten over the last week or two is after Lou Rockwell was kind enough to publish my article on the argument for morality, I got a number of, you know, well-meaning and kind-hearted people who sent me long emails telling me all about how Ayn Rand has a theory of morality which is, you know, and that they sort of explain it in fairly great detail.
I sort of found this interesting because, you know, nobody actually, so far, although I've gotten quite a number of emails on the article, nobody's actually gone through the logic and said this is correct, this is not correct.
You know, people have either sort of railed against it because, you know, as one person has put it, and this is sort of based on both the articles and my podcasts, you know, if I believe in God then I'm a child abuser and so on.
But nobody has actually gone through the logic and told me whether I'm correct or not.
But what they have, a number of people have done, is they have said to me, you know, Ayn Rand has this theory of ethics which is very interesting and they go into great detail about it.
And I mean, I'm a, what do they call it, a randoid.
I'm a rand-nut from, you know, way back.
I think I read the Fountainhead when I was 16.
It came Through a good friend of mine who's now a professor in the States and he got it because he was a big Rush fan and I quite remember that he was a big Rush fan and I was a big Pink Floyd fan so we had I guess a slightly different sense of life back in those days.
I've since grown to appreciate Rush a little bit more and I've seen them I think twice live.
But I just have a little bit of trouble getting past Geddy Lee's voice.
It does sound a little bit like Mickey Mouse on helium.
So... Sorry, non sequitur number one tangent number six million four hundred and twenty two thousand two hundred and three.
So I certainly appreciate everybody who sent me in all of this information about Ayn Rand's theory of morality.
Which is, you know, for those who've not read it in a while or have never heard of it, I'll just give you the very brief overview of it.
Ayn Rand argues that what is best for supporting human life, or that which best furthers human life, is the good.
Human life requires interaction with empirical reality.
Empirical reality is objective and rational and therefore that which is objective and rational is that which best supports the ability of human beings to survive.
And therefore, you know, rationality and morality, sorry, rationality and objectivity are the foundation of morality and so on.
And I've, I mean, I've certainly read that argument a number of times now.
I recently finished listening to a 60-hour version of
Atlas Shrugged on audiobook and I mean I'm certainly fairly familiar with the argument and I've even used it myself on occasion actually on more than one occasion more than probably five dozen occasions in conversing with people about morality but I've never been satisfied by it emotionally and by that I mean that I've always felt that there's a problem at the root of it and since working on my own theory of morality the problem I think that I've identified with what is at the root of Ayn Rand's moral theory
We call it sort of the value of life theory, or that which furthers life theory.
And the problem is that there really are three ways, and I'm certainly not the first to come up with this by any means, there's three ways that you can live, right?
You can earn your keep, you can ask other people for charity, or you can take from them by force.
And I would sort of add, as a subset of taking them by force, you can bully them when they're children.
As those who've listened to a couple of these podcasts perhaps know, I don't have a very elevated view of the morality and emotional dynamics of the modern family.
And so what I would say is pretty common is that parents treat their children pretty badly when they're young, but they bully them quite a bit into, you know, what is right and what is appropriate and so on.
And then when parents get older, They then sort of cash in on all that bullying, even though their children don't really like them very much.
I mean, they may not be aware of this, but, you know, they don't go and see their parents out of pleasure, but out of obligation.
And then the parents cash in on all of that bullying of their children and get lots of, you know, money, time, energy, and resources supplied to them when they're old, right?
I mean, the kids will take care of them.
The kids will come when they have to go to hospital.
The kids will put them up, even, or put them in an old-age home, and so on.
And, you know, that's not a survival strategy that is based on rationality and objective morality, but rather is based on, you know, bullying children and defining for them the good and then unleashing anger or withdrawal or emotional criticism on them if they, you know, disobey.
And so one of the problems that I have with that is that it is not a a sort of survival strategy based on rationality, but it certainly is a valid survival strategy.
And again, if we just, we throw out all the moral considerations here, but we just look at sort of the biological survival strategies, you know, wherein we don't look at our intestinal parasites as evil, you know, beings exploiting us, but just it's a purely biological strategy, then that's a perfectly valid way to approach survival.
You know, just in terms of the transfer of resources from people who are earning it to people who want it.
And so what has never really satisfied me is that for certain people it is a perfectly valid and beneficial survival strategy to manipulate others rather than to earn oneself.
So for instance, I mean just to take an example that's not, I mean it's a little extreme, but I think it sort of makes the point.
if you are in the middle ages a physically weak man but who has you know a beautiful speaking voice and is incredibly gifted linguistically uh... and you know has a sort of naturally spiritual mentality then it's a much more beneficial survival strategy for you to preach that there is a God and you know to you know
Befog people's minds with the eloquence of your sermons and so on, rather than go out and pick up a hoe and, you know, do some farm work because, you know, you're kind of physically weak.
So, to manipulate people and to lie to them is, you know, from a purely biological standpoint, is a very valid survival strategy for people, you know, who aren't particularly good at, you know, productive labor.
Another example is, you know, our good old friend George Bush was, you know, significantly a sort of standout failure in the business world and everything he touched turned to ash.
And then he got into the world of politics, and now he's amassed a huge fortune, and he's gotten power and fame, and he's sort of the top dog on the planet as far as control of military power goes.
So it would be very hard to argue that his survival strategy is somehow flawed, because he's doing fairly well.
Similarly, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, it would be hard to argue that their survival strategy is flawed, given that there are, like, what, 5,000 princes, each with, like, four wives and, you know, dozens of children apiece.
So from a purely biological standpoint, the survival strategy of You know, bullying and exploiting others is perfectly valid.
Now, you can say that it's immoral, and I think that the argument from morality does say that it's immoral.
But you can't say that it's immoral based on the fact that you have an idea of what is good for a human being's survival.
And say, well, objectively, sorry, human beings have to deal with rationality, rational objectivity, sorry, a rational and objective empirical reality, and therefore to be rational and objective as human beings' best source of survival.
That's certainly true for people who are in the first category of those who earn their living.
However, for those who ask and those who take, and the subsection of those who take being those who bully children, the reality that they're dealing with is not objective and empirical reality, but rather the subjective reality of other people, right?
So if you teach children that, you know, there's a God and that God tells him to, you know, honor and obey his parents, then You get all of those resources from that child when you get old, right?
When that child grows up and you're sort of getting old and ill and you need money and resources, you get all of those without having to go through the challenges of having to be a good person.
So, I mean, that's to me the flaw that I see in Ayn Rand's theory.
You know, she was trying to define what it is meant by morality, but To manipulate and control others is a perfectly valid survival strategy and you can't just say it's immoral because you're trying to prove the existence of morality.
So you can't sort of say well it's immoral to do this thing because when you're talking about survival strategies that is the best way for certain people to survive.
Now my argument for morality does deal with this issue and the way that I deal with this issue briefly and I know those who've heard this before you know you could fast forward for a minute or two if I can keep it down to a minute or two But my argument for morality is to say that if you're going to create a moral rule, then it has to be valid for all people at all times.
And if you are not going to create a moral rule, that's fine, then you could just sort of take whatever you want and sort of be this amoral animal.
And that's fine, that's a valid survival strategy, but you cannot claim that what you're doing has anything to do with morality.
And the reason that I'm perfectly comfortable doing that is that the vast evil, by far the greatest amount of evil in the world is done through an appeal to morality.
If you look at the abuses of religion, and if you look at the abuses of the state, and if you look at the abuses of public schools, and if you look at the abuses of families, It's all based on people defining what is moral and what is good, claiming that it's universal when in fact it's completely hypocritical.
So I have no problem saying to people that you can do whatever you want but you can't claim any There's no ability for you to claim any moral absolutes unless you make them universal and applicable to all people.
And that is going to rid the world of, by far, the majority of its evil.
Because as soon as you take morality out of the hands of hypocrites, they're just sort of revealed as pathetic parasites.
And that's really where we want them to be, to make that very clear.
So another thought, this is the thought that I'm finally getting to the thought that I had when I was working with my wonderful wife today and that thought was that we were sort of chatting about some sort of family issues that we, some exciting family issues that we've had this Christmas and we actually did a podcast about this which we may or may not release at some point but there is a very interesting
Economics to faith, or economics to bullying, which is well worth examining.
You know, when we're looking at these three choices of earning, asking, or taking, there is something that is very interesting that can occur for people who are presenting value.
We have a medical journal in the house, and on the back of that medical journal is an advertisement for fertility pills.
And you know these are pills you're supposed to take them and they're supposed to increase your capacity to to get pregnant and to have a baby.
Now they don't have any statistics here saying you know if you buy these pills you have an X percentage greater chance of getting pregnant or having a baby and so on.
And I think that's very interesting.
And if they get, if they can get people to buy their pills Just based on hope, based on, well, you know, there must be something to it because they've got an ad and people must be buying it and so on.
Or, you know, people who are just so desperate to get pregnant and they'll just sort of throw the money at anything.
You know, it could be, you know, if you buy this snake and put it into the house, it'll give you good mojo for babies or something.
And so, you know, nothing sort of personal about this company in particular, but it did sort of strike me.
That this company was able to sell these pills without proving their value and therefore they had saved an enormous amount of money relative to a company that actually had to prove the value of the pills.
So I mean I think it costs at the moment something like 500 to 800 million dollars to get a drug approved by the FDA in the United States and you know if you could but if you could somehow bypass that process and I'm not saying that's a beneficial process because I'm in the free market guy of course but let's just say you could bypass that process and get people to believe that some pill that you've made was beneficial to them to an equivalent degree that some other pill
Which had gone through that process was beneficial to them.
So, you know, there's all this sort of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia nonsense around.
So, let's say that you, you know, spent a billion dollars creating and testing a pill and found that you could get, you know, 10 or 20 percent of people to significantly improve by taking your pill.
Well, you have to recoup an investment of a billion dollars, which is going to be quite a challenge, right?
But if you can come up with some other pill that you just kind of have anecdotal evidence for, you gave it to a bunch of people and they said, yeah, I feel better and you didn't sort of measure anything and you didn't get any statisticians or diagnosticians or doctors involved, then you've just saved yourself an enormous amount of money.
The reason that I think this is interesting, I mean this is obviously fairly self-evident, but if you think about this in terms of religion or the state or nationalism or racism or sexism and so on, all of these isms where categories are considered more important than instances.
Then I think it's fairly clear that if you can get someone to believe your moral theory or your metaphysical theory without having to go through all of the effort and work of proving it, Then you have just saved an enormous amount of money for the same amount of resource transfer.
So let's just say that my podcasts get picked up tomorrow, broadcast around the world, and I become like the, I don't know, the second coming of morality or something silly like that.
And then people start giving me all these gifts and they come to hear me speak by the thousands or the tens of thousands and I go through the streets of cities in my own little Popemobile and I can get to live in a gold palace and wear funny hats and this and that, right?
Well, you know, it's a pretty powerful transfer of income.
And, you know, there's a couple of ways that you can do this.
And it could be because I give people real value and help them solve problems and, you know, I've sort of slaved away for a couple of decades on developing theories of rationality and so on.
And at any time I can be proven wrong, right?
So someone can sort of... I'm like the hero of all moral history and become fabulously wealthy and famous through doing this work.
But however, I'm always subjecting my moral theories and my philosophical theories and my economics theories to empirical verification so someone can come along and just knock me right off my pedestal by Proving that I have a flaw in my logic or I make a certain prediction or a series of predictions and the opposite occurs and so on.
So it's an enormous amount of work and it's an ocean of mental sweat to produce a new moral or philosophical theory.
And you also have to become somewhat decent at being able to explain it in a way that is enjoyable for people.
So maybe that can get you some benefits financially or materially, but at the same time you can always be disproven and kicked off your pedestal and someone else can come along who's better at logic or has figured out problems that you haven't and then they become the new guru or whatever.
So that's one way of giving value to people.
Now the other way of giving value to people is to just basically get them while they're children and bully them.
And, you know, manipulate the natural and almost unbreakable biological bond that children have with their parents, right?
And leverage that biological bond into sort of a twisted loyalty to a false morality.
So, you know, in the realm of religion this is pretty common and I don't want to sound like I'm picking just on religion because this occurs with nationalism as well.
You know, all that flag-waving, singing to Canada that I did when I first came here, which was rather startling to me, since I was more used to seeing films about the Battle of Britain and talking about the glories of World War II in England, so it was, you know, same crap, different pile.
So, you know, children are naturally wedded and bonded to the good opinion of their parents, because that's a basic survival strategy for children, right?
You don't want to cheese your parents off to the point where they toss you out in a snowbank and try for another one.
So, you naturally are going to obey your parents, and that power that parents have can easily be manipulated into bullying them, into believing things that are false.
Because, as I've mentioned in another podcast, we are designed not to have integrity, or to be courageous, or to live by truth, or to be rational, but we are designed to survive.
And people will certainly throw rationality to the four winds if it threatens their survival.
And that's exactly as it should be.
You know, we are not abstract philosophical beings, but living biological creatures.
And if we don't get to pass on our genes, it really doesn't matter how rational we are.
So, what I'm trying to say is that from a purely economics standpoint, to bully children To believe things that are false is far cheaper than to rationally prove to people what is true.
And not only is it cheaper, but it's more efficient in a lot of ways.
Because you can bully children long before they have the capacity to reason.
Therefore, if you want to really sort of lock in a child's obedience to you, you get the child while he or she is very young, which is long before they have the capacity to reason, right?
So you can stop bullying a kid when they're like two, three, or four years old.
You can even bully them earlier if you just, you know, if your kid's crying and, you know, you just don't want to get up and And take care of them because it's inconvenient or you have some moral theory that it's going to make them soft if you take care of them at night or you give them a feeding or whatever, then you're immediately starting to bully your child, you know, almost from the day the cord is cut.
And so you can do that and that kid is going to pretty much be perpetually locked in.
If you look around the world at cultures and how long they last and how little they change you can see that you know once you get children bullied very young it's you know almost completely impossible for that child to be able to think their way free of that mess when they get older.
I think so far my wife and I and you know to some degree one other fellow is all that we know of So, you're fairly safe and it's fairly efficient and fairly effective.
Very efficient and effective to bully children when they're younger rather than to try and reason with them either when they're younger or when they get older.
So if you're sort of looking as to why there is such a prevalence of culture and religion and patriotism and so on, well why is that?
It's because it is the cheapest and most efficient way to transfer resources unjustly.
And so to sort of look at this from a macroeconomic level, If you can get children to believe that their country is best and that the government is their country, then they will be sort of morally helpless when their country comes and says, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
And they're like, yeah, that is better.
That is less selfish or whatever.
As opposed to saying, there's no such thing as a country.
Be good to yourself and those you love.
So, from a country's standpoint, if you can get people to believe that, you know, everyone who has wealth is simply lucky, or has been blessed through unjust circumstances, or at least unequal circumstances.
You know, you always get these people who've made a lot of money who talk about giving back to the community, like they somehow stole all of their money.
Well, that's complete nonsense, and it's incredibly hypocritical, and it is one of the things that kind of irritates me when I hear it.
Because if you're giving back to the community, then you don't actually own what you have, because you stole it from the community.
And therefore don't give me any nonsense about how philanthropic you are, because you're giving back to the community.
You've stolen your wealth if you accept that premise that what you have is taken from others.
It's like the Mafia comes and steals all my furniture and then decides to give me back a footstool.
I have the right to question their moral benevolence in that situation.
But if you can get people to believe that the rich have simply taken all of their stuff from the poor, then when the government talks about a redistribution of income, then you have no sort of moral grounds to oppose it.
And of course, you're not going to have any luck saying, well, if redistribution of income is valid, then, you know, I should do it, you should do it, the poor should do it, and so on, because you already have been patriotic enough to believe in a government and a state and so on.
So governments have a great old time getting you in government schools and getting you sort of patriotic.
And, you know, if it wasn't for the government, we'd all be speaking German, and we'd all be living in the gutter and so on.
And the language that is used is very telling.
The redistribution of income does imply that it's been distributed already rather than earned, right?
Like there's some central bucket of cash that is sort of given out, and it's given out unjustly, like a parent with twins who gives one three times the allowance to another.
That's just not fair.
So, you know, a father will come in, like the mother does that to the twins, the father will come in and say, okay, let's even this out.
Everyone gets two.
You don't get three and you get one.
Everyone gets two.
We're redistributing this income.
So that's sort of one way in which the government gets control of all of our money, which is to just get us while we're very young and, you know, stoke our anger up against those who have more and stoke our pity up towards those who have less, both of which are completely unjust responses to differences both of which are completely unjust responses to differences of abilities and economics and choices.
I mean, absolutely nothing wrong with being poor and there's, you know, nothing magically beneficial about being wealthy.
Churches, of course, do this continually.
You know, get the kids when they're very young and, you know, frighten them with hell and talk to them about how God loves them and watches them all the time and, you know, that if they do a bad thing, like an angel gets a splinter or something like that.
And you get them all sort of wrapped up in emotional stuff and then if they don't want to go to church or have any questions, just getting sort of cold and angry, And from there, you get this sort of split, right?
There's always a split, right?
There's the abstract entity which gets the money, and then there's the concrete people who get the money.
So in the state, like, the government takes your cash, but it's individual civil servants and bureaucrats and the police who actually get paid and so on.
and in the church of course the church gets a fair amount of your money but it's the parents who really cash in because it's the parents who get all of your time and emotional energy when they get old even if you don't really love and respect them you just feel that it's something that you have to do because they're your parents and blah blah blah
So there's that aspect that's very powerful, that for a relatively small investment, like for 10 years of Sunday school where they herd you in with a bunch of other kids, and you know, a bunch of Sundays, you get, you know, basically two decades worth of, you know, well you get a whole life of bullying your kids to come over for Christmas and coming over for
dinners and you know baptisms and birthdays and anniversaries and christenings and you know basically with any decent sized community you can spend two days a week going to social events and still have more that you can go to so they get your participation in all of that even if you don't like or respect the community or like or respect the people or find it an enriching and enjoyable experience which by definition you can't because it's a community
and therefore it's a bunch of sort of bigoted opinions that can't ever be discussed in any depth.
So you're never going to have any rich or enjoyable emotional interactions with people in any kind of community, you know, other than I guess you could say a community of scientists or philosophers or, you know, I guess you could say capitalists too.
So, for a relatively small investment, you know, bullying a bunch of kids collectively, some emotional manipulation, you get an enormous lifelong payoff in terms of time, energy, money, and you still have to sort of play the guilt strings relatively continually.
I mean, in the Jewish community, of course, this is so rampant that it's almost not even worth commenting on.
You know, the synagogues get money, churches get money, politicians get money, governments get money, time and resources from us.
And it's not like they've proven any value to us.
It's not like they're appealing to our rational pleasures.
You know, they're not like the Xbox 360 guys who are trying to sizzle all of our senses.
You know, they're just basically what they do is they define a false morality to us.
And they then play upon that false morality to keep us weak and keep us obedient and keep us dependent.
and it becomes very quickly when you become an adult the situation becomes that really they have nothing to offer you except the withdrawal of a negative right so I mean speaking from my own experience I used to have lunch probably up until six or seven years ago I used to have lunch every week with my evil crazy mother And why did I do that?
Well, because by doing that I felt like a good son, which was a sort of minor positive.
I got to tell people that I was, you know, yes my mother's difficult but I have lunch with her every week and I could see that sort of sad little spark of sad admiration in their eyes.
But, you know, the other thing too was that if I didn't go, you know, my nasty and sadistic elder brother was going to get very angry at me.
and you know say that basically I'm a selfish bad person and you know my mother was a difficult mother but you know she she's lost and you know surely surely I can forgive her and she was doing the best that she could and she herself had a difficult childhood and blah blah blah and you know what answer could I have to that?
You know, A, I want to be a good son and a good person, and B, I don't want to be a selfish, cold, callous person who doesn't take care of his enfeebled, you know, sort of pathetic mother.
What, is she just like supposed to, you know, sit in the streets when the snow comes?
And so, you know, we gave her money and we gave her time and we gave her resources.
And we, you know, sort of sat and listened to her crazy theories about how all her doctors had poisoned her and how she was going to take vengeance on the world and so on.
And, you know, I did that because I felt like it was the right thing to do.
It was the good thing to do.
And because I was afraid of Two things.
I mean, I guess one, I was afraid of my brother's hostile and violent opinions against me.
And second, I was afraid of the social condemnation or at least intense social disquiet that comes, you know, when people say to me now, oh, how's your mother?
And I say, oh, I don't know.
I haven't seen her in six years and I hope never to see her again.
It's like, oh, what?
Even if she were dying, you wouldn't go to her deathbed?
It's like, no, wouldn't that be entirely hypocritical?
I mean, either you love people or you don't, either you find value in their company or you don't.
It's not like my mother's company suddenly becomes better because she's struck down with some bad illness or something.
So, it's a sort of false morality and a fear of negative consequences that had sort of enslaved me into this dependent and frankly immoral and hypocritical role, wherein I poured a lot of energy and resources into somebody who I loathed, despised and feared, It's really not a beneficial situation and certainly not a moral situation.
Because if it's good to put resources into those that you loathe and fear, and it's also of course good to put resources into those you love and admire, then you have a complete contradiction.
The opposite behavior produces the same moral rules.
You know, or as my brother, after I had stopped seeing my mother, but before I had stopped seeing my brother, sat me down because he was obviously somewhat upset, let's say, that I had stopped seeing my mother.
And he sat me down and he said, you know, if you don't see mom, you're kind of letting her win, you know, because if you don't see her, she's then controlling your actions and you're making decisions based on your dislike of her.
And so on.
You're sort of running away from a problem and she's making you run away and she has control and all that.
And so I just sort of stared at him and I said, and it was scary to say, but I did say it because it sort of made sense to me.
I said, well, so what you're saying is that we should see people we like because we like them and we should see people that we don't like because we don't like them.
So, basically, we should see everyone.
There's no one that we could ever not see, no matter how badly they treated us or how much we didn't like them.
And, of course, like all people who rely on false moral arguments, he simply got red-faced and changed the topic, right?
Because these people hate discussing anything of any substance once you're onto them.
So, I mean, this rather personal tale, I mean, I think is a way of illustrating what it is that I'm trying to talk about, that we need to look at faith-based morality or illogical based moral claims as an economically efficient way of transferring resources in order to be able to understand the deep and abiding power that is behind these.
I mean it's a lot more fun, I would say it's a lot more fun in the short run to bully children than it is to be a good person and by fun I don't mean you know that everyone's a sadist it's just that Being a good person in an immoral world is a very, very difficult thing to do.
You know, you have to, as I've mentioned before, question all of your primary relationships, and you have to be passionate about things that make people enormously uncomfortable and hostile.
And you really have to stick by your guns, no matter everything that's going on, that can be very difficult.
So it's a lot easier just to sort of bully your kids into conforming with your moral prejudices, so you don't have to make any of those difficult decisions.
And so it's important to look at just how, you know, from a purely amoral standpoint, it is much more efficient to sell people something that is false and bully them into believing that it is true than to actually tell them something that is true.
And if we sort of fail to understand the economic efficiency of that, then we are, I think, not looking at the deep root of corruption, profitable corruption that is at the base of all of this stuff.
And I think we're considerably weakened thereby, especially when it comes to talking to people about the truth.
If we don't recognize the power and the profit that is in the corruption that we're facing, and in the evil and falsehood that we're facing, then I think we are not giving enough respect to our enemy.
And if we don't give enough respect to our enemy, it seems to me very doubtful that we'll ever be able to win.
So I hope this has been very helpful.
Some excellent Christmas cheer for you there.
And again, I hope you're having a wonderful holidays, and I will talk to you soon.
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