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Dec. 29, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:35
31 The Billion Dollar Proposition

Exploring the limits of free will - or, are irrational people responsible for their irrationality?

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Time Text
Good afternoon everybody!
It is 5.17 p.m.
because precision is so important on December the 29th 2005 and I hope that you're all having a wonderful break and unlike one of my loyal listeners who has written to tell me that he is spending today grading exams from his students which he considers to be a terribly dull task and given most of the people I went to school with I can understand why.
I hope that you're having more fun than than he is.
So, I've had two interesting emails...
that are, I think, rich enough to talk about.
And, you know, one of them is from a writer who I quite admire, who asks, you know, wonderful questions.
And the other is from a writer who I don't admire quite as much, but whose email contains enough instructive errors that I think it's worth having a go at.
And to solve this, I'm going to introduce something that I call the Billion Dollar Proposition.
And so let's jump right into it.
And from a person who I really enjoy receiving emails from, but until I talk to him directly, I won't reveal his or her name.
He wrote to me, and this is what sort of provoked my last podcast about Christianity and moral responsibility.
and he has written to me and after saying some very nice things says regarding your answer that Christians are guilty of a crime sans intent because they have not in a society where information is readily and freely available taken the opportunity to question their beliefs instead choosing to pass those beliefs along without rigorous examination I believe you are right on an intellectual level, and that proclaiming an absolute should require an artful examination of one's position.
To people who think, this much is second nature.
But does the requirement of intellectual rigor not mandate a level of skill and rationality to those who, almost by definition, lack that requisite rationality?
Which takes us back to the original question of intent.
Can Christians, in the absence of the rationality required to philosophically examine one's own position, be held accountable for a kind of moral criminal negligence if they fail at this higher cognitive task?
And, of course, this is a wonderful question and, you know, cuts right to the heart of moral responsibility and, to some degree, our feelings of fellowship towards our fellow thinkers or pseudo-thinkers.
So I'll tell you what I think of in terms of free will and you can let me know what you think and I certainly look forward to your responses.
Free will is something that, you know, you can go mad trying to understand, analyze, and identify, but I think that we all understand it in our gut.
And, of course, I always do find it enjoyable when people try to argue me out of believing in free will.
In other words, they're attempting to change my mind about my ability to change my mind, which is, I think, quite funny.
And just sort of an example, and I'm not saying that this gentleman is making that, that claim, but it's just the kind of example of the foolishness that people get into when they simply refuse to begin reasoning from basics and build their intellectual structures up from a firm foundation of rationality and empiricism, and they just start, as Ayn Rand used to call it, philosophizing in midstream.
So they'll just pick up stuff and start going with it with no reference to reality or empiricism.
But I call it the billion-dollar proposition, and I think it might be helpful to you.
to uh... sort of understand what it is and and what it means and see if it's helpful to you in understanding this question of free will it used to be the million dollar proposition but of course uh... the government has uh... been in control of the money supply for quite some time now and so it is uh... no longer a million dollar proposition but inflation has tacked on a few well i guess three zeros So, the million-dollar proposition is simply this.
Let's take something which is often referred to as a disease, which is alcoholism.
And let's take another thing which is referred to as a disease, which is cancer.
Now, to me, one of the things that will help differentiate what is actually a disease and what is not is the question of choice, right?
So, let's say that you have a nice, tidy, shiny pile of dollar bills stacked in a small square in the center of a room that add up to a billion dollars.
Okay, maybe it's not a small square and maybe it's a large room, but you have a billion dollars and somebody comes to your house and During the course of a dinner conversation, let's say you just have a sheet of tarpaulin over this, and they say that, um, I'm an alcoholic.
I have a disease.
I can't control it.
Or, you know, it's very hard to control, or it's impossible to control, or whatever, right?
Well, I think that's fine.
Then you say to them, well, I'll tell you what.
If you don't have a drink for the next 20 minutes, I will give you this nice shiny pile of a billion dollars.
You can take it in sacks out to your car and drive home.
Now, of course, the supposed alcoholic's eyes will light up at that proposition.
Much like the cigarette of a smoker will not light up if you make the same claim to a smoker and you say, if you don't smoke for the next 20 minutes, then I will give you a billion dollars.
So their eyes will light up with greed and they'll be very excited and look forward to spending all that lovely money.
Now, I mean, the length of time is unimportant.
I mean, it could be two days, it could be a month, like, if you just... whatever length of time is valid for you, or for them, it is what you can propose, right?
And their eyes will light up, and they will by far think that they are getting the best part of the bargain, because, you know, if the incentive is a billion dollars, they cannot perform that kind of action for that period of time.
Yet, if you have somebody come over to your house who has bone cancer or bone marrow cancer, something horrible and something like stage 4 lung cancer or something that, you know, they just don't have more than a month or two or three to live, and you say to them, I will give you a billion dollars if you don't have cancer for the next 20 minutes.
I very much doubt that their eyes will light up with greed.
In fact, their eyes will light up probably with either rage or a sort of pity for your moral foolishness.
So I think that the billion-dollar proposition is a very important way of helping people to understand or helping to understand where people have choices and where they don't.
And you can take sort of a number of approaches to the moral choices that people make and you can help to understand where they do have choices and where they don't have choices.
So let's have a look at some other examples that will help clarify this, I think.
So, you know, for instance, if you say to somebody who has schizophrenia, that I'm going to pay you a billion dollars if you don't hear voices for a day, rather than you, I don't know, let's just say you could magically test the auditory hallucination part of his brain.
Well, you're not going to have any luck, right?
If you pay someone, if you offer to pay someone a billion dollars to not have the symptoms of a neurological or biochemical mental illness for a day, they're not going to have any luck taking you up on your offer.
Their eyes aren't going to light up with greed and You know, think that they've got the better of you.
But if you look at something like infidelity, you know, people say, oh, you know what?
It just happened.
I didn't have a choice.
My wife I haven't had sex with my wife in six months, and I was lonely, and I was on the road, and I was drunk, and so on.
Well, they say, well, basically, it just happened.
You know, that events unfolded to a particular position where I had no choice, but to do what I did, or a choice wasn't really an element, and so on.
But, of course, if you say to that person, I will give you a billion dollars not to sort of sleep with this woman at this conference somewhere, then they will probably take you up on it.
They will sort of miraculously find the willpower to do the right thing or to at least not do such an egregiously wrong thing.
And that's another way of looking at it.
Just the billion-dollar proposition is a way of testing for the existence of free will.
Not all of us enjoy our jobs, but most people will go to work so that they can have something to eat at the end of the day.
So they do that because there's an incentive for them to go to work.
And they're responding to that incentive.
So it's a very important criteria to apply to the choices that people say that they can make or they cannot make, which is to look at the billion-dollar proposition and see if their behavior would change given the right incentives.
And if it would change given the right incentives, then you know you're dealing with an issue of free will.
There's another aspect wherein this is, I think, very helpful when it comes for people to understand their families.
Now, I'm aware that my own family was probably worse than most, though of course there are many families out there that were even worse than mine.
And I'm talking about my family of origin, of course, not the blissful Cloud Nine that I inhabit with my wife.
But one of the things that my brother and I argued about to some degree in the past was our different sort of moral evaluations of our mother.
I mean, our father to some degree as well, but that's another story.
But our mother, who was a violent and abusive woman, He claims that she was doing the best she could.
She was a single mother.
I should understand it.
I haven't been in that situation.
I don't have children yet.
And so on.
And, you know, those are all arguments that I can understand and appreciate.
But, you know, what I said to him was, well, I sort of took two approaches at trying to unravel this sort of moral question.
And don't worry, I will eventually get back to this email that I started with, but this is all sort of the deep background to the portrait which I'm going to paint.
It's all part of a larger process, I promise you.
So my response to my brother's statements that my mother, you know, did the best that she could, this is all she knew, and this is how she was treated, and so on, was twofold.
One is that I said, Well, if my mother had been paid a million dollars, this is back when it was a million dollar proposition, if my mother had been paid a million dollars not to beat us, say, for two days straight, then would she have been able to do that?
Would she have been able to pull that off?
And, you know, of course she could have, right?
I mean, although she was evil, she was not somebody who was mentally ill to the point where she could not process incentives or cause and effect.
So his argument that this was the best that she could do was not particularly compelling to me, right?
I mean, if she had developed some sort of biological ailment and she had become schizophrenic, or say she had some sort of chemical imbalance that caused, you know, extreme mood swings or something, then She wouldn't, you know, the billion-dollar proposition wouldn't have meant anything to her because she would have been unable to control her symptoms, right?
Any more than, you know, if I feed you eight glasses of water and pay you a billion dollars not to pee for a week, you're probably not going to be able to pull it off, right?
I mean, that's things which you don't have any control over and everybody sort of understands what the difference is between those.
So that was the first argument that I had sort of in response to this moral question of the culpability of parents for abuses that they perpetrate on their children.
The second was, you know, did she do it in public?
I mean that's a very important question to ask when you are dealing with moral issues and I mean this particularly unpleasant one is around children I mean because it's something that is so unequivocally bad, right?
To perform violent actions against your children for the sake of, you know, blind, petty, immature rage, I think we're all going to chalk on the dark side of the moral fence and not have a lot of ambiguity about.
And so my question to my brother, which I think is also helpful when it comes to differentiating parental responsibility or moral responsibility in general, is You know, she never did it in public.
Like, when we were out at the mall, she would never sort of haul off and clap us over the head.
When people were over visiting for dinner, she didn't sort of drag us from the room and pummel us.
And, you know, when the Mormons would drop by with their books and literature and all that, she didn't, you know, scream at us and throw stuff at us.
And so, you know, without a doubt, My mother was perfectly capable of restraining her impulses.
It's just that when she knew that she could get away with it, i.e.
when it was just us, then she felt perfectly free to vent for whatever evil pleasure that gave her.
But, you know, she was absolutely and without a doubt completely and totally able to control her impulses.
And the reason that I know that is because, of course, you know, my brother and I grew up into adulthood.
And nobody knew about the abuse, right?
So there was people who came in and out of the house, relatives, my father who had left when I was very young.
None of these people knew about the abuse.
Now, that's not accidental.
That's not the result of somebody who is taking a sort of random and deranged approach to life.
I mean, one of the criteria for knowing whether somebody has committed a crime, in other words, they had a moral knowledge of what it is they were doing, versus somebody who just acted randomly because they're crazy, is, you know, did they try to hide it?
Right?
So, I mean, if I go and kill someone, and then I, you know, bury the body in some remote location, and I wash my hands, and I wash my car, you know, all of this kind of stuff, and then I come up with, I make sure I have an alibi, and so on, well, I'm not crazy.
Right?
I mean, if I go and, I don't know, start beating up someone right in front of a cop, then I probably am crazy, right?
Because I'm not able to process the consequences of my actions.
But the moment that I try to hide something, then I am in fact morally responsible.
And through my act of hiding it, I have also revealed that I am perfectly capable of changing my behavior.
And, you know, I remember sort of pointing out to my brother that, you know, my mother could be like in a full out, you know, conniption, crazy rage.
And...
And the phone would ring, and, you know, she'd sort of go from this shrieking, deranged harpy to somebody who would pick up the phone and say, Hello?
You know, just in case it was her boyfriend on the line.
So, without a doubt, my mother could change her behavior.
She wasn't subject to that kind of irrational, uncontrollable rage.
And so, to return to my good friend's letter about to what degree can we expect rationality from people who may not have our intellectual abilities, I think I can sort of, much though I'm not a big fan of sports metaphors, I think one may be appropriate here.
Let's say that this gentleman is perhaps arguing to some degree that you and I are professional tennis players and we've been practicing for twenty years and our skills are honed to a razor edge and we can bullet the ball from the back corner of the net anywhere that we want to with a ferocious spin.
And is it really fair for us then to say to people who are amateurs, look, you should be as good at this as we are, and judge them as being inferior for not being as good at philosophy or truth or rationality as we are, both through a combination of natural talent and long-time practice?
And I think that is a very interesting question, and I think that's at the heart of what this gentleman is talking about.
Are we who have the ability to be rational and to work so logistically and who have perhaps a more pragmatic or empirical streak to our natures.
Are we just lording it over other people calling them bad and wrong because they don't happen to have this particular talent?
You know, sort of similar to, I don't know, like the cool kids in high school who come from families who have, you know, lots of money and, you know, they've got, you know, cool hair and cool clothes and, you know, they're good-looking or whatever.
And so these kids run the high school and socially But, you know, they didn't earn any of this.
It just happens to be a particular set of circumstances and physiologies that they were born with.
So what right do they have to say, sort of, we're the kings of creation and, you know, you weasels should serve us or whatever?
So, you know, we obviously don't want to be in that position where our natural talents for rationalities and our naturally pragmatic natures turn us into sort of pompous know-it-alls who can lord it over everyone else for being irrational.
But that's not the case.
That's not the case here.
And those of you who've heard my podcast before shouldn't be surprised at any note of absolutism in my voice.
But it's absolutely not the case.
And I'll sort of explain why that is.
First of all, if somebody is an astrologer, we don't call them a scientist.
Right?
So if an astrologer says to me, you know, I've got this great scam going, you know, I mean, I put all this numerology crap together and, you know, insecure lunatics pay me for, you know, this sort of random number mucking about and, you know, think that they're getting some sort of deal for their money and I'm going to tell the future and, you know, tell them, you know, How many kids they're going to have and what their names are going to be and all this kind of stuff.
Then I say, well, you know, I think it's an immoral scam that you're pulling, but I'm not going to argue with you epistemologically.
I'm not going to argue with you and say that you're wrong in the source of your knowledge, right?
Because you know you're scamming people and you choose to scam people, and you're not trying to tell me that numerology or astrology or whatever is real.
So, you know, you're not a friend, you're definitely an enemy, but you are not a sort of epistemologically or metaphysically corrupt enemy.
And you're not going to teach your children that astrology or numerology is true.
You're just going to say, hey, you know, if you're feeling kind of ethically loosey-goosey and you want a fairly easy source of income, this might be a way to go.
However, the moment that An astrologer, or a psychic, or a tarot card reader, or any of these idiots, the moment that they say that what we do is scientific, that what we do is true, that what we do is verifiable, Well then, my friends, they have stepped into the arena.
You know, we didn't drag them in there.
You know, those of us who know something about how to differentiate truth from falsehood, you know, we didn't drag them kicking and screaming and throw them into the lion's den.
They themselves have voluntarily come into the arena wherein their propositions are subject to verification and examination.
Nobody forced them to.
It's their own choice.
But they've decided to come into the arena.
So, many moons ago I had a girlfriend who told me that she was psychic.
I mean, I'm not going to count how many moons ago, but let's just say it was quite a few.
And, you know, even back then I was fairly, I was pretty skeptical of all of this stuff.
And I said to her, wow, you know, that's, that's great.
I mean, that's fantastic.
And I got really excited.
And she was like, she obviously got a little alarmed by my level of excitement.
And she said, why, why is that so great?
And I said, well, I mean, you're rich.
She said, what?
I said, you're rich.
She said, I don't know what you're talking about.
And I said, well, it's the amazing Randy.
who is uh... not a porn star but in fact a magician uh... has had a i think for about thirty years now has had a million dollars U.S.
in the bank which he has volunteered to hand over to anyone who can prove that they're psychic right and you don't have to be perfectly psychic but you don't have to pick i don't know a hundred percent of random cards and predict them correctly i mean even if you get five percent over, you know, random distribution over long enough testing time, you know, he will hand you a check for a million dollars.
I said, I can finally realize my dream of being a kept man.
You know, you can be my sugar mama.
This is going to be beautiful.
Let's go down and pick up the check.
And of course I got the stare, right?
It's not to be used for gain.
You know, that kind of stuff.
But, you know, I didn't care if, you know, if she said to me, well, you know, I I think I might be psychic, but I don't have any proof.
And, you know, then that's like, you know, like me saying I had a dream about an elephant last night.
Well, OK.
I mean, who's to prove me right and who's to prove me wrong?
Now, if I say everybody had a dream about an elephant last night, that's a whole different thing.
And, you know, epistemologically it's similar to saying, I like ham!
You know, that's not an empirically verifiable statement.
Well, actually, even that might be empirically verifiable, because you could hook up the electrodes to the pleasure center of the brain and see if they fired off when you had a nice piece of ham.
But, I don't know, like, let's just say it's not, right?
So, I like ham is one statement.
Ham comes from pigs is another statement.
So I like ham.
Yeah, you know, it's nice, right?
I like this view, you know.
I prefer wearing track pants to speedos.
I mean, lots of things that you can say that are just base preferences and nobody's going to haul you into the arena of truth and falsehood and rationally examine you.
Because it's unverifiable and it's unprovable.
And it doesn't matter.
Fundamentally, who's going to take the time, right?
So if I'm lying about liking ham, who cares, right?
Maybe my pigs.
Anyway, so the moment somebody comes out with a statement which is something like, God exists, Jesus Christ died for our sins, the Bible is absolute truth, pray to Allah five times a day facing Mecca or whatever, that this is the absolute morality, that heaven exists, that hell exists, that the saints exist, that miracles exist, all of this stuff, that leprechauns exist, whatever you want to say, the moment you start making statements
Which are not about subjective truth, or subjective opinion, but rather objective reality.
Well then, my friend, you have stepped into the arena.
And you have absolutely no cause for complaint if people come along and say to you, that's very interesting.
Let's have a look at your proposition and see if it's true or see if it's false.
I mean, you don't see scientists getting all up in arms because, you know, some magazine requires a peer review of their findings.
It would be inconceivable for a scientist to say, I found fusion in a jar, and no, you can't test for it.
I mean, that's not even a scientist.
That's just some lunatic in a lab coat.
So, I think that's an important thing to realize when you start talking to religious people, or socialists, or communists, or collectivists, or mystics, or all of these people.
To the degree to which they say, eh, it's kind of my opinion, I like fooling around with tarot cards, but I'm certainly not going to claim there's any truth in it.
We might say that there could be more productive uses for their time, but who cares?
I like video games, and it's not like that gives me a PhD.
But the moment that they start to say that something is true, well then, they have said something quite different.
They have said something which is absolutely open to rational examination.
So, how does this bear on my good friend's letter?
Well, he is saying, to some degree, that yes, Christians, a lot of them don't spend a lot of time trying to, you know, question their own faith or figure out what's true and what's false, and therefore, you know, maybe we can let them off the hook because, you know, they're intellectually weak, they don't know what they're saying, this, that, and the other.
Well, the final thing that I will say about that, and why I think that that's not a proposition that we should act on, is that there's a very large difference between not knowing something and not wanting to know something.
So, let's say that you're a smoker in 1948, right?
So you really enjoy having your pack a day.
And you have no clue that it's bad for you.
I mean this is sort of, you know, they used to paint, I think it was like women in the 1920s after radium was discovered used to paint radium on their teeth so that they would glow when they went to nightclubs because nobody had any clue that it was so dangerous.
And of course these people were just completely wrecked physically within 10 or 15 years.
But if you don't know something, you know, fair enough, right?
So you're a smoker and you don't know that smoking is bad for you.
And then I think it was like in the early 50s that the Surgeon General came out with the first fairly conclusive evidence that smoking caused emphysema, lung cancer, heart defects, heart problems, and so on.
Now, to be a smoker prior to there being any evidence that smoking is bad for you, And smoking isn't the best example because, of course, you have trouble climbing a flight of stairs if you smoke a pack a day for 20 years.
But let's just say that, you know, you didn't have any idea that smoking was bad for you, then you can to some degree be forgiven for not knowing that.
And, you know, then if you get lung cancer or whatever, people are going to say, well, that's, you know, that's a shame.
I didn't know either or I have sympathy.
However, If you then find out that the Surgeon General has released a report about the health effects of smoking, and you stare at your pack of cigarettes, so round, so firm, so fully packed, and you look at that and you say, oh man, I love smoking.
Oh, it's so good.
I bet you it's not that bad.
I bet you it's just going to say that it's going to give you a toothache, maybe.
and you just refuse to read anything about it well now you're in a whole different category morally so you now no longer are in a state where you can't know and there's no way to know and so on and if you know you keep hearing people talk about it and you start to hear oh lung cancer oh man that can't be good and you know your friends start quitting and your kids are begging you to quit and then
You know, I don't know, celebrities that you know die from lung cancer, like Humphrey Bogart, I think, died of lung cancer.
These sorts of things start to put the responsibility on you.
So it's one thing if you don't know, but it's another thing completely If you resist knowing, if you actively evade knowing, then you are morally responsible for the consequences of that.
And that's really what I want to focus on.
And this gentleman's argument, I think, is that they're incapable of knowing.
That Christians are incapable of being rational.
And he has some arguments about, you know, which I've talked about before.
You know, their community will disown them and, you know, people will be upset and so on.
But of course all we have to do is go back to the billion-dollar argument, right?
So if you go to the Christian and you say, I will give you a billion dollars if you read this article on atheism and teach it to your children for a week.
And after that you get a billion dollars.
Well, you know, they'd probably do it, right?
Because they'd say, well, okay, I can fix the The evil atheism my children might have for that week and I can use the billion dollars to further the good works of the church and pay the legal bills of the priests or whatever.
So just offer them the argument or the billion dollar proposition and see if they would go for it, in which case they are perfectly capable of exploring alternatives to their viewpoint.
So they're capable of exploring alternatives to their viewpoint.
They just choose not to.
And they're absolutely morally responsible for that choice.
Now, of course, you may say, well, you know, you offer the billion dollar proposition to a Christian to sort of study atheism or have his kids study atheism for a week.
They're just going to go through the motions.
They're going to, you know, have their kids repeat it like some sort of empty formula.
And then every night they're going to whisper to their children that it's not true.
It's not true.
It's not true.
And, you know, that's fine.
I mean, my issue isn't whether or not they're going to do it wholeheartedly, right?
I mean, it's not like if you offer the guy to quit smoking for two days a billion dollars that he's going to do it and enjoy it.
He's still going to want his cigarettes.
That doesn't matter.
The question is, can they do it or can they not do it?
You know, as I mentioned before, if you try and pay someone, A billion dollars to not have cancer for two days?
By golly, they're just going to have cancer for two days.
And if you pay someone a billion dollars to live to be 200 years old, then odds are that they're not going to be able to cash in.
So all I'm talking about is, is it possible for them to do it or is it not possible for them to do it?
Don't worry about whether or not it works.
Right?
It's not, I don't think, intellectually honest to say, well, we're so far superior to these people that they can't conceivably look at alternate viewpoints and so on.
So return to the sports metaphor.
Let's say that we're the ace tennis players.
You know, we're not dragging amateurs on the court and beating them and thinking that we're, you know, just the kings of all creation.
The more appropriate metaphor is to say that, you know, we are good and experienced tennis players and people come on to the court and say to us, you guys don't know anything about tennis.
We are the best tennis players.
We are the only good tennis players and you guys don't know anything about tennis whatsoever.
Now, I don't know about you, I think that the truth is worth fighting for.
And so, if I was a very good tennis player and somebody came onto the court and just basically said, you're a bad tennis player, you don't know what you're talking about, I'm the only good tennis player and I can beat you without even opening one eye.
Well, you know, part of me would say, all right, saddle up, pilgrim, let's take this for a spin and let's see what happens.
Because it's very important to understand that when you're talking to irrational people, religious people, and collectivists, and socialists, and so on, they're not neutral here.
They're making a claim that they possess universal and absolute metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and moral truth.
They're not saying, I happen to believe in leprechauns, and I know it's a personal quirk, but that's just my thing.
They're saying that they have an absolute, universal truth about everything.
Nobody's forcing them to make that statement.
Nobody puts a gun to their head.
I mean, okay, they get bullied a lot as they're kids, but a lot of us do, and we don't all end up crazed epistemological mystics.
So the moment that people come into our life and say things like, everybody has a right to health care, and if you're at all interested in my response to that, there's a couple of podcasts here.
I also have an article on the rockwell.com.
Everybody has a right to health care.
The government must redistribute money to help the poor.
The old people need our pensions and therefore we have to pay them.
God exists.
You should be patriotic.
Support your troops.
As soon as people come in and start saying things like that, then they have stepped into the arena of verifiable truth.
They're making universal claims, much like a scientist, and therefore they absolutely have to subject their claims to the verification and examination of others.
And that's, I think, the part that bothers me the most about these sorts of people.
And let's just talk about Christians.
I mean, I don't want to pick on Christians because they're just one group of these people, but I don't want to have to keep rhyming off a list whenever I'm talking about these people.
Let's just talk about Christians for now.
So, the reason that I know that Christians know exactly what they're doing and are not dumb and are not crazy and are not irrational in the sort of pursuit of their goal is that they know about the power of morality.
They know about the power of universal truth.
They know about the value of moral prescriptions and ethical absolutes because that's what they use Right, somebody who's in a bar fight can't pick up a gun and use it and then say, uh, I had no idea that the gun was so powerful.
Because they've picked it up and they're using it in an extremity.
So obviously they know that that's the most powerful thing.
Similarly, Christians grab kids by the neck when they're very young and shake all of this terror of an all-seeing God who knows everything, and the guilt of original sin, and the guilt of Christ died for your sins.
I mean, what a claustrophobic argument that is.
And, you know, that Christ cries when you do a bad thing and an angel loses its wings if you masturbate or whatever nonsense that they come up with.
And, you know, God loves you and the church is this and, you know, you've got to get into heaven.
Yeah, you could do this.
They know about the power of universal morality because that's what they inflict upon children.
They know about the power of absolute truth because they say that God is love and that absolute truth is what God is and that you have to have allegiance to what is true and what is right and what is good.
They know all about the power of morality.
Don't underestimate them, and for God's sake, don't look upon them as misguided fools.
They know exactly what they're doing.
So, to me, the argument that, well, they're just not so bright and, you know, they just have a tough time examining things and, you know, they just kind of... Don't be fooled for a moment.
They know exactly what they're doing.
There's no way that something this universally politically and economically powerful lasts for two thousand years.
just because people are dumb or just because they're misguided you know they cut right to the core of what it is that human beings live for which is truth integrity and morality now they wrap it into this insane deranged faith towards the invisible and give us your money and baptize your children and we own all of the significant events in your life and come to church and give us a percentage of your income they do I mean they wrap it up in all of that crap
but right down in the heart of in the heart of it in the really important core of it they know exactly what they're doing and i would argue that christians and religious people as a whole and socialists know far more about morality and the power of morality than libertarians do because my friends they are beating us hands down so i for one don't sit on a pedestal and say
I'm the only smart guy around and these guys are all idiots because, you know, they're kind of running the world.
You know, so it's kind of hard for me to say, uh, gee, if only they were as smart as me.
You know, if only they were as smart as me, then maybe they'd be powerless and completely in the minority as well.
You know, I mean, my friends wake up to the facts of the situation, which is that irrational people and corrupt people Run the world.
And that's not an accident.
That's not because they're dumb and they don't know what they're doing.
It's universal.
It's constant throughout history.
Crazy people run everything.
I mean, we got a guy in the U.S.
who is going off and killing 130,000 people so far because God told him to.
And you've got all these other people who's thinking, yeah, that's a good idea.
I think that's wonderful.
If he thinks God told him to, then I guess we've got some genocidal guy in the sky who's, you know, given in commandments that are kind of moral.
We've got people voluntarily submitting to send 50% of their money or more to the central political authorities so the government can use it as collateral to borrow money which is going to completely destroy the economy that their children or that they hope their children will grow up in.
We pay money to the government so the government can hire the police and troops to take money from us.
I mean, it's ridiculous!
It's one thing to be domesticated, it's another thing to wander into the farmer and put your own neck in the noose and stand by while you get milked into oblivion.
So, I would say that the temptation to underestimate how much or how deeply Irrational or mystical or socialistic people understand morality and the power of morality, I think is to completely miss it.
And it would never in a million years explain how they've won.
I mean, if we're so smart, why do we always lose?
And so I guess I would say that I start with a fair amount of humility that way, and a fair amount of trying to work from the facts of reality, which is, you know, they kick our butts every time, over and over, and that's why I'm so focused on this argument for morality, and so focused on helping people who are interested in freedom and spreading truth, in understanding that
If you don't take the argument for morality, if you don't use that, there's no point getting into the arena at all.
I mean, you're not even in the arena.
You're just wasting time somewhere.
You're like in a bathroom stall, yelling at some graffiti.
You're not actually out there fighting anything good.
And the last thing that I'll say is And this is not only to my friend who wrote in, but to everyone out there who has mystical, socialistic, right-wing, left-wing, religious people, crazy, cultural, irrational people in their lives.
Well, I would say that all you need to do is test your theory.
So, if you believe that Christians say, again to pick on Christians, let's just say that you think that Christians are just kind of not so bright, kind of uninformed, and you know, that they can't do any better intellectually.
I think that's certainly a worthwhile theory, but there's no point having that theory and sitting on it.
So what you want to do is you want to pick some disposable friendship.
Some friendship that if it goes away you're not going to get fired and end up living in the gutter.
So you go and pick some friend of yours who's of this persuasion, let's say.
And you sit him down and you say, my friend, I would like to talk to you about your beliefs.
And you begin to question this person based on the argument for morality and ask how universal and consistent rules could be drawn out from this.
And you start to talk about, you know, the ten questions that I suggested last time.
You can ask religious people.
If your theory is correct, that they're just not too bright and they've just never been exposed to these things and so on, then they're going to be really curious.
Right?
Like, I've never been exposed to Chinese opera, but if somebody sits me down and says, oh, you've got to listen to this stuff, it's great.
You know, assuming that I'm not Late for work, you know, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to be curious.
I'm going to say, well, that's really interesting.
Tell me more about it.
Where did it come from?
How does it work?
What are the plots?
You know, it sounds very alien to my ears.
And maybe that person would know something about how, you know, the chords that we find pleasing is a cultural thing and so on.
And I'd learn a lot because, I don't know, I've never been exposed to Chinese opera.
I don't know much about it.
So, you know, What I'm saying is, go to your friends and expose yourself.
Go to your friends and, you know, talk to them about this stuff.
And if you're right, that they're just kind of not so bright or never had the information or, you know, don't have the capacity, then they won't be offended.
They won't be upset.
They won't be angry at you at all.
You know, I mean, if a physicist sits down and tries to explain some, you know, brain-bending calculus to me, I'm not going to be offended.
I'm going to say, listen, I'll follow you as far as I can, but this really isn't my thing.
I mean, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I don't know that I'm going to be able to follow it.
But, you know, hey, I mean, I'm always interested in learning new stuff, and maybe this will be helpful to me.
So, that's what people who don't have knowledge of a particular field do when someone comes to talk to them about it.
Or, you know, they'll be openly curious, like, wow, I've never thought of that before.
Hey, that's really interesting.
So that's the way that you would prove this theory that Christians either aren't that bright or haven't been exposed to the ideas or whatever.
So, you know, good luck.
You're going to go out there and I can tell you exactly what is going to happen.
You are going to face initially a kind of benevolent and smug condescension.
Oh, you poor sinner.
You know, Jesus Christ has told me to be kind to the blind.
And I'm going to sit here and I'm going to listen.
And then I'm going to lead you to the light.
And you're going to get all of this, huh?
Well, I can certainly understand that from your perspective, that you might have some problems with the beauty and the divinity of Jesus Christ.
And you're going to get all of this stuff, and you know, good luck.
It's a little tough to stomach.
You might need an insulin shot or two, but you know, best of luck.
And if you continue to be persistent, then you're going to get irritation.
And if you continue to be persistent, you're going to eventually reach a point where the Christian is just going to say, Stop!
I will not listen to any more of this.
I will not listen to any more of this.
At some point, you will hit that.
And the reason that you will hit that is because people who are irrational know that they're irrational.
People who are schizophrenic, even, often, know that they're schizophrenic.
They just can't help it.
But people who are irrational, abso-positively-lutely, know that they are irrational.
And they also know that they're hypocritical.
Because if you claim an absolute, and somebody comes along and points out to you that you're incorrect, you should fall on your knees and thank them.
If somebody comes along to me and proves to me that there is a God, I will fall on my knees and thank them.
Because the last thing I want to do is to operate in error.
If somebody comes along and proves to me that there's no such thing as morality, fantastic!
I'll take to a wild life of crime or something.
I mean, the last thing I want to do is to live in error.
So if somebody comes along and is able to correct me, Thank you!
I really appreciate that.
I appreciate the questions that I get.
I mean, except for the snarky ones.
I was going to read another guy's email, but I don't want to just now, because I've already gone on long enough.
But if somebody is genuinely trying to help me to understand something that I don't know or have made a mistake on, I mean, what a wonderful thing to do for another human being.
You know, I mean, if my doctor says, if you continue to eat this much chocolate, you're going to die next week, Thank you, my physician!
I mean, what more could you ask for from another human being than to help you to correct erroneous thinking?
I mean, it's very hard to think straight because we're all taught such nonsense from day one.
So I believe that there are absolutes.
I believe that there are universal absolutes.
And I've been working for 20 years to prove that there are.
And I think I've made some good progress.
If not, perhaps magically or miraculously clinched the case.
So I do believe in universal absolutes and I work very hard to make sure that I know what I'm talking about.
I worked on this stuff for 20 years before I published anything.
So, I take the responsibility of striving for as much accuracy, honesty and integrity as possible, because I am fully aware of the power of universals, and the power of universal morality.
If you make a mistake, millions of people die.
If you make a mistake, say, on a little thing called communism, well, 50 million people, 40 million people die.
Families are destroyed.
Civilizations are destroyed.
People live and die in gulags.
They're enslaved.
They starve.
They kill.
They murder.
They rape.
It is an orgiastic nightmare, a violent horror, when people get universals wrong.
So universals need to be treated like Like radioactive substances, you have to be so, so, so careful.
Because they are so, so powerful.
So, when someone comes along and says, I know the universal truth and its name is God!
then you absolutely have to examine them, and if they have any interest in truth whatsoever, they will thank you for every flaw that you point out in their theory.
If, however, they are a spiritual robber, if they are somebody who is using the power of universals for personal gain, for profit, for gaining the false respect of their children, for fitting into their community, for looking good on Sundays, then they're scum!
They're absolute scum.
And the only way that you're going to know if they're scum or not is to start to question them.
And if you start to point out the flaws in their thinking and they get hostile, I'm sorry.
I mean, this is not my decision.
This is not my judgment.
This is just a fact that people who use universals without taking care to ensure that what they say is true are unleashing the demons of hell on the world.
You know, look at the twentieth century.
Seventy million people murdered by governments all in the name of absolutes, all in the name of universal morality.
You don't mess around with this stuff.
You have to be so careful.
You have to be absolutely rigorous.
It's worse than atomic warfare.
Far more people have died, thousands of times more people have died for the sake of absolutes than for the sake of nuclear weapons.
And if some guy was waving around some nuclear bazooka at your party, you'd probably tackle him to the ground.
Well, that's what I'm talking about.
You have to, have to call these people on their errors.
And if they continue to persist in their errors, they are the most dangerous people in the world.
People with false absolutes will get you killed.
And that's actually not part of my Christmas message, but that's where I will sign off for today.
I hope this has been helpful.
I do have another very interesting email that I think could spark a lot of interesting discussion, which I will try to get to tomorrow.
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