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Jan. 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:26
39 The Economics of Conformity
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Good afternoon, everybody.
It is Tuesday, January the 3rd, 2006, and I hope you're doing well this fine afternoon.
It is 5.30 and I'm just heading home from work.
Actually, I'm heading to the gym, and then I'll be heading home.
Christina's seeing a patient in the evening today.
So I've been having a chat back and forth with a very interesting and erudite gentleman who has been debating with me and hammering me in a very productive way about some errors in my thinking or errors in my arguments to do with Christianity and moral responsibility.
Two gripping topics at dinner parties and you know if this doesn't pick you up chicks I really don't know what will.
So his argument, well let me start with my argument and then the holes that he productively punched in it.
My argument was that, you know, Christianity is a form of mental abuse for children, that teaching children to believe things that are not true is bad for the children and, you know, produces for them a life of conformity and unhappiness and, you know, problems relating to people and problems relating to reality and so on.
And so he said, well, that may be true, but, you know, is it really a crime against children to teach them religion?
Because, of course, I was affirming that it was.
And he said, well, what if the Christian person has never encountered any other views, right?
What if the Christian has never even imagined that there isn't a God and so on?
So how could he be culpable for his decisions to teach religion to his children?
And my argument back was, I mean, it was an excellent point, and my argument back, or my refinement back, was to say that we all have pretty instant access to criticisms of our viewpoints.
I mean, as libertarians, we are constantly faced with criticisms of our viewpoints every time we turn on the television or read a newspaper or or chat with anyone about any topics of substance.
So, you know, we take it for granted that people have been exposed to contradictory ideas and therefore are responsible for what they believe.
But the gentleman who was writing to me said that that may not be the case, that the Christians never heard of these arguments.
And of course I was saying, well, you know, it takes you about 10 seconds on the net to find lists of biblical contradictions and problems within religious texts.
And these are sort of contradictions in fact and in ethics and in logic.
And so a Christian is fully responsible for, you know, if he or she is going to say this is the absolute truth, the Christian is fully responsible for, you know, finding out the alternate viewpoints and teaching their children critical ideas and so on.
I mean, as I've mentioned before, I can take position in just about any argument and argue it fairly convincingly just because I'm inhabited by multiple personalities.
And, you know, you've heard all of the opposite arguments your whole life to things like libertarianism or atheism, and so we're all very used to and comfortable with those ideas.
They're not unfamiliar to us at all.
Now, he then wrote back with an additional question, which I thought was excellent, which was actually more of a And I don't mean that in any negative way, you know, he was critiquing my ideas, which is what I put them out in the public domain for.
And he said, well, the difference is that, you know, if the damage that's done by a Christian to his child is not physical, right, so it's mental damage, it can't really be equated to sort of, you know, hitting your child or something like that, which is, you know, perfectly fair and was a metaphor that I'd used.
So, you know, is it really fair to say that the Christian is morally responsible for inflicting harm upon his or her child when the harm is invisible and, you know, they're probably hanging out with religious people who all agree with them anyway?
And an excellent, excellent point.
In fact, I will get behind this gentleman's rebuttal and rebut myself even further, which is to say that I bet you, you know, quite a good chunk of change that if you are a Christian and you are in a Christian community, it would probably be seen and viewed as child abuse to not teach your children about, you know, the loving Lord.
So, and this may not just be the case if you're in a Christian community.
So, for instance, If you are just in a Western community, let's say in the States or in the South, and you bring your child up to be an atheist or, you know, intellectually honest, let's say, you bring up your child to be an atheist or a libertarian or an anarchist or, you know, all of the things that kind of go against the grain.
I mean, you could say communist as well, and that would probably have similar viewpoints Similar reactions from people.
But if you teach your children the truth, the mainstream is never the truth, at least never really in the history of man, except perhaps during the Thomas Paine era, late 18th century America, when hundreds of thousands of people bought and read something like The Rights of Man, which is a well-written and well-argued and pretty good book.
The majority is always wrong, right?
I mean, I got this great term from somebody who sent me an email the other day called sheeple, right?
Which I think is disrespectful to sheep.
No, I think it's disrespectful to most people because most people simply are, you know, too busy to get into philosophy and they don't have the bent for it and, you know, of course they didn't choose the school system they were put under and they didn't choose the economic incentives to keep them away from any real knowledge that are in place.
So I think that it's probably not Fair to call them sheeple, but I still think it's a pretty funny term.
So I would say that it would probably seem abusive to a Christian to raise their children to be non-Christians, even if that Christian has doubts about the veracity of what is Christianity, right?
So if I've got kids and I'm sort of having doubts and, you know, I think it's, I can't remember which American writer has this great metaphor about doubt, you know, where it's like a stick insect trying to climb a shower wall and there's water running down and, you know, you can keep fighting, but eventually it's just going to get washed away.
And so if you have that experience as a Christian adult, are you going to teach your children about the doubts that you're experiencing and what you feel is going wrong?
No, you're going to wrestle with those doubts.
I mean, according to the tenets of the faith, you're going to wrestle with those doubts.
You're not going to communicate them to your children.
Even if you did end up losing faith completely, you'd probably just go through the motions.
Because if you teach your kids that there is no God, well, what's going to happen to them?
And I'm just talking from a purely economic and social standpoint, you know, which aren't unimportant.
Well, what's going to happen to them is they're going to alienate their friends.
They're not going to be invited over to other people's families.
When they get to university, they're going to, you know, have a couple of crazy, kooky, libertarian, anarchist, atheist friends, but, you know, they're going to be very much outside the pale.
You're kind of setting them up for a lifetime of hiding their true beliefs in social situations and of, you know, facing that agonizing choice that, you know, libertarians or truth seekers always face.
Which is, you know, when you hear someone who's just spouting off the most pompous and windblown nonsense, what do you do, right?
Do you sort of interrupt every dinner party 40 times to say, well, you know, that's really not true, or, you know, have you really thought about this?
Have you really thought about that?
And, you know, all of the social discomfort that that can produce, often resulting in being labeled a, you know, crazy, fringe, lunatic, obsessive, cult, nutjob, and perhaps even facing a diminishment in your Dinner party invitations, right?
So it's always a tough balancing act when you are in possession of some capacity for reason and original thinking to be placed in social situations with people who don't know that they don't know, right?
They just sort of repeat everything that they've been told as if it's absolutely true.
And, you know, never have any doubts and, you know, get pretty aggressive when any doubt is sort of exposed in them.
So, it could actually be said to be quite the opposite, even of what I was saying earlier, that the argument could very strongly be made that to teach your children non-Christian values in a Christian society is setting them up for a lifetime of social difficulty and alienation, and it's going to cost them career opportunities, and they're going to have a tough time in university and graduate school.
People are well-paid to conform, I guess is sort of what I'm saying.
They're not only well-paid to inform, but there's a lot of social reinforcement to conforming.
You know, this idea that there's lots of, sort of, sheeple out there who just, you know, go along because they're brain dead or whatever.
Well, you know, it may be the case, but, you know, human beings are pretty good at maximizing resources.
Human beings are pretty good at making proactive and effective social and economic choices.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is that, you know, people are pretty well paid to conform.
Right.
I mean, I think it was Murray Rothbard was going to speak at some dinner somewhere and, you know, I don't think he was getting paid.
I think he was getting like a six-pack at a dinner or something like that.
And a friend of his was going and saying, you know, how come, you know, Friedrich Hayek gets so $20,000 per speech and, you know, Greenspan is the head of the Fed.
And you've got, like, smack, right?
And he's like, well, you know, nobody ever, you know, Hayek sold out, you know.
And he said, well, why didn't you sell out?
It's like, well, nobody ever made me an offer.
And I think that's some truth to that.
I mean, I don't think it's true that nobody ever made him an offer.
I think they recognized that Rothbard was a lost case of individual integrity that couldn't be bought out.
But, you know, a friend of mine when we were young, a very cynical friend of mine said, You know, all these people who complain about other people selling out are just mad because they never got a good offer.
Or any offer, right?
You know, it's like the old maid who is contemptuous of her friends who settled for average husbands when she never even got asked.
And so, you know, from an economic standpoint, people are well paid to conform.
You get great tenureship, Right?
You get access to the media.
You'll get interviewed as a talking head.
Right?
You'll never get interviewed as a talking head on CNN if they're not entirely and absolutely sure exactly what is going to come out of your mouth ahead of time.
Right?
If you're not just sort of mimeographed and you've said the same thing the last 500 times you were interviewed, which they can review and be ready for, then there's absolutely no way that in live TV with not too bright anchors That you're going to be asked any questions that aren't sort of instantaneously recognizable and categorizable soundbites.
So, you know, you get a lot of social comfort.
You get to enjoy the newspaper without feeling your blood pressure go up.
You get to turn on the news without rolling your eyes.
You know, you don't have to sort of suffer through a lifetime of feeling that you're surrounded by, you know, dangerous and ignorant people.
And, you know, it's easier to find a mate if you agree with other people.
It's easier to bring up your children if you agree with other people.
And so I would sort of get behind this gentleman's excellent critique of my position.
You know, wherein I'm saying it's abusive to teach children that Christianity is true.
Because he's saying, well, it's an invisible thing and they think that they're doing the right thing.
And I sort of go even further behind his criticism and say that, you know, on many, many objectively verifiable levels, they are doing the right thing by their children to teach them that Christianity is true.
Even if they don't believe that it is true.
So I think that that's an excellent critique and something which I kind of wanted to discuss.
Right?
I mean, I have an enormous amount of respect for the mental structure of Christianity and, you know, other types of religions.
And I think that, you know, if you don't, then you may have very different criteria for that than I do.
But, you know, as far as an intellectual virus goes and it's sort of a low labor tool for transferring resources, you know, it's done pretty well.
You know, I mean, if you include the Old Testament, we got like four or five thousand years of income transfer with almost no effort.
You know, like some Jewish friends of mine were, you know, they were kind of left alone and allowed to not be very Jewish before they had children, right?
And then it was like off with the foreskin and into the synagogue.
Because you're allowed to sort of play around with not being part of the tribe and not paying for the tribe as long as you don't refrain or keep your child away from the tribe when they're very young, right?
I mean, the cold claws of the tribe want to close over your child's neck very early on in life before they get the chance to think about anything because you can't program something which can think, right?
So they really want to get your kid young and they're circumcision.
They want to get them into the synagogue.
They want to get them part of the youth groups and so on, like from day one or maybe day 1.01.
And so when they sat down with their rabbi, the rabbi was like, well, you got to pay, I don't know, $1,500 or $2,000 a year to belong to the synagogue.
And they're like, well, that's quite a bit of money.
And he's like, well, It's like a gym membership, right?
It's like a gym membership and all that kind of stuff, right?
Except, you know, with a gym you get equipment and health, right?
With a synagogue or a church you just get conformity and, you know, tall tales.
But, you know, let's give respect where respect is due, right?
If I were a perfectly amoral human being looking to maximize my resources, without a doubt you want to be a thundering, you know, well-jelled-with-a-blonde-wife guy from a pulpit because it's little labor.
Highly reproducible.
You get kids young.
You program them.
They're yours for life.
You get paid huge amounts of money for making thrilling speeches.
As far as a perfectly amoral transfer of wealth goes, it's about the most effective that there is.
It's like the government, but you don't have the expense of a military or the police.
You're tax-free and all this kind of funky stuff.
Let's give respect where it's due.
They've come up with a pretty airtight set of syllogisms and beliefs and defenses that have really, you know, lasted the test of time.
So, I don't think that, you know, somebody who's like somebody who does teach their child that Christianity is true and gets behind it and so on, you know, they're setting their life, their children up for a pretty sweet life of conformity and, you know, maybe in a sort of purely economic sense, The income that they get from having contacts that they don't irritate with their atheism is more than the money they have to spend on the church, right?
So maybe, in a sense, the church is selling you all of the economic benefits of social conformity in return for believing a load of crap, learning, turning over your children to priests, and, you know, paying the tithe or the money to the church.
Of course, we're not including Catholic priests here where the consequences economically might be a little bit more extreme in that it's, you know, people who've been sexually abused have a very, very tough time in life having a go at grabbing the brass ring.
So, again, we just look at it purely from an economic standpoint and purely from a sort of social get-along standpoint.
Christianity is a very benevolent thing to teach your children.
And non like sort of conformity with the generally sort of left of center and centrist political views Teaching your children that so, you know basic religion not crazy religion because that's gonna alienate them again, right?
The sort of Christian acceptance or religious acceptance is a bell curve So at the one end you have, you know pure atheists who are definitely outside the pale and then the other end you have these David Koresh's who are Relatively outside the pale as well.
So you want to teach them some sort of nice, conformist and comforting Christian pieties or Jewish pieties or whatever.
You know, go to church, be nice, go to synagogue, be nice, be well-read, be respectful, read this, read that.
And, you know, don't teach them anything totally nutty like, you know, go out and bludgeon homosexuals or whatever the Old Testament says, but teach them some pretty nice comfortable stuff where they can get along without looking crazy.
So, economically, it may be still better off, even though you've got to pay the church a tithe to teach your children about Christianity because they won't have any awkwardness in business situations or social situations, and they'll be sort of one of the bunch of salmon swimming nicely in the current of religious nuttiness.
Well, that sounds like a flavorful dish, doesn't it?
Hello, we have salmon in religious nuttiness for you tonight, sir.
So I think that there's a very strong argument to be made that children are better off in many, many ways by being taught Christianity.
However, you know, and this is a pretty large however, I don't see any particular, this is not an argument against it, but it's a consideration to be thought of in regard to it.
I don't see any particular line between, let's go along with things that are not true in order to gain economic and social security.
I don't see any particular line between teaching your children about Christianity and, you know, in Nazi Germany, encouraging your children to become, you know, good Nazis.
Or, you know, teaching your children that what you want to do is to rise to the top of the communist hierarchy, you know, ordering as many mass murderers as you can get your hands on in order to prove your allegiance to Stalin or Brezhnev or whoever.
And I'm not sure that if you're going to say that, you know, economic and social pleasantries take precedence over the truth, I'm not sure exactly where you're going to draw the line And say, well, at this point it's becoming too immoral for me, and therefore I'm going to back out.
Right?
I mean, there's no death like the death by degrees.
There's no death like slowly being buried in ashes until you just can't breathe.
Like, where do you stop?
Where do you draw the line?
And, you know, there are lots of people who will say, well, sort of instinctively, I would draw the line here.
But there's lots of reasons why that really isn't going to work.
You know, there's a number of theoretical reasons why that's not going to work, but there are an even greater number of practical reasons.
So, you know, sort of theoretically, one of the reasons why it's hard to get out of a corrupt situation or a corrupt system that you've kind of bought into for the sake of financial and social ease, well, you know, as you get older, it's not like your financial requirements go down.
So, like, you come out of university and you're like, well, I'm sort of not so big on the government, but, you know, here's this great job.
That the government is offering me and I think I might be able to do some good in here and, you know, I need the money and maybe I'll look for something more entrepreneurial later.
So you kind of get in there and you start working.
Well, now you're sort of embedded, right?
So you've got a regular paycheck, you buy some stuff, you get a car, maybe a condo or whatever, and now you have payments, right?
So it's kind of tough to say, I'm getting out, you know?
You know, you might look for some entrepreneurial stuff, but now of course the problem is that You're a guy who works for the government looking for something in the entrepreneurial world.
A. You're not going to meet anyone in those circles who works in the government.
And B. Even if you do, they're going to say, oh, a government worker.
Yeah, I'll be right back.
I'll be calling you right back.
So, you know, you're going to have more difficulties getting out once you're in.
And also then, you know, you've got kids and so on.
And you have, you know, you get a great deal of difficulty getting out of those sort of situations.
And, you know, the other reason why it's kind of tough to get out is, I mean, not only your social circle, your economic and job circles are all centered around your participation in this falsehood, but, you know, you also, the status of having you in is larger.
And that's sort of important.
And this can sort of be a positive and a negative, I mean, in a sort of purely materialistic sense.
So let's just take the example that you rise to the top of the Politburo in Soviet Russia.
Well, if you're some 12-year-old gymnast who defects, then the Russians can say, well, you know, that doofus, you know, what the heck did she know?
She defected because she was 12 and she wants to play Pokemon or something.
But if you're at the top of the Politburo and then you defect, well, you know, that's really not so good.
It's a lot harder to explain for the powers that be.
So, you know, when you're one of the top line guys in Russia and you're going overseas in the Soviet era, well, you know, they're not going to let you take your family with you.
You know, and if you don't come back, they're going to throw your family into a gulag or just kill them.
So because you've become more prominent or longer lasting within this community, The community now, or the leaders within that community, have a much stronger motivation to keep you roped in.
Because if you defect later on, it's a lot worse for them, sort of from an image standpoint, than if you defect earlier on.
So, sort of an example of this is that if you are high up in the government and you are looking at defecting and spilling the beans, right?
So you're some politician and you've got a whole bunch of backroom deals that you know about, that you want to go public with.
Like all the sleazy crap that goes on behind that veil of the media that the media puts up in the government.
Well, what's going to happen?
Well, you know, first of all, they're going to sit you down.
As soon as they get even the slightest whiff of this, they're going to sit you down and they're going to say, well, look, you know, obviously we've overlooked you.
We want to promote you.
We want to give you more money.
We want to give you a nice ambassadorship to the Trinidad and Tobago or Hawaii.
And, you know, it's all going to be tax free and happy, happy, happy.
Right?
So they're going to bribe you with everybody else's money as much as they can.
And if you still keep going, then they say, well, you know, we hate to sort of show you this side of our natures, but we're going to have to, we are going to destroy you and your reputation.
Right?
So we're going to manufacture internet records that you, you know, love, you know, youthful gay goat porn or something.
And we're going to get you all, we're going to audit you and you're going to spend the next five years in court.
And we're going to find something that you have missed on your taxes, because we always do, and we're going to throw the book at you, and we're going to send you to prison, and, you know, and we're going to make sure you don't get any other jobs, because any company that's interested in hiring you, we're going to threaten to audit them as well.
And so, you know, this is sort of where you are.
You either get a nice tax-free ambassadorship to Hawaii, or, you know, you spend five years in court, spend half a million dollars fighting us in legal fees, and then end up in jail.
I mean, I know I'm talking about a pretty extreme situation, but I sort of want to point out the principle that you can't just sort of dip your foot in this corrupt pond, right?
You go in and, you know, it's sort of death by degrees, and then when you're in you just can't get out.
You know, no sane human being would take that, you know, that option of, you know, go to Hawaii or go to jail.
No sane human being is going to say, you know, for the sake of an integrity that I compromised 20 years ago, and have been progressively compromising more and more ever since, then I'm going to put myself through all this public humiliation and shaming and legal battles and, you know, income drains and jail time.
I mean, there's no human beings going to do that.
Now, when we talk about religion, things are a little bit different.
Because, you know, they're not going to throw you in jail or anything.
But if you go back on a church There is going to be a lot of public shaming of you.
And if you've never gone through a juicy chunk of public shaming, I would caution you to say to others, well, that's the price you pay for being in a corrupt situation.
Because it is pretty awful, I can imagine, public shaming of an extraordinary kind.
What the church can do to people who cross it is pretty savage.
If you just look, for example, at what happened to the people who were abused by these serial pedophiles.
They were ignored.
They were publicly humiliated.
They were told to be liars.
terrible venom that you would imagine that, you know, guilty and corrupt people would throw at anybody telling the truth.
You know, that's what occurs and it is a pretty horrible thing to go through.
I mean, you've got the pain of being violated in one of the cruelest ways and you also have the pain then of, you know, the supposedly moral institution, you know, blacklisting you and publicly humiliating you and slurring you and, you know, paying people to dig up crap on your past.
You know, all of that kind of stuff.
So, you know, that's a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
And, of course, by the time you're in there, you know, you've got kids who are part of the church, you've told them that, you know, you're big on the whole God deal, and you've based their moral and epistemological education on the existence of God.
So, you know, your kids sort of have their whole infrastructure of childhood and youth ripped away and they looked upon you as a hypocrite and so on.
And, you know, it's very hard, you know, one of the things that's very hard to change if you're sort of a sort of liar by proxy or liar by default if you tell people things that are true that you don't understand.
You know, one of the things that's very hard is to then be believed In the future, about anything.
One of the things that somebody I know had a terrible difficulty with was their wife was unfaithful and told them two years later.
What a nightmare!
To sit there for two years in a marriage and not have any idea that your wife is unfaithful, What that means, basically, is she can start to have another affair, and you won't know it, because you didn't know about the last one.
So you become suspicious about every little thing, and you start making stuff up, and imagining things, and every time you get a phone call and a hang-up, you begin to worry again, and you start to look at your wife suspiciously.
If you hurt someone, or if you lie to someone, you have like 20 minutes to fix it.
I mean, it may be not exactly 20, but it's not very long.
You have a very short amount of time to fix it.
Because if you don't, then, you know, you've proven that you're perfectly willing to live with the situation, and, you know, all of the time that, especially if the other person doesn't know that you've hurt them, right?
Then all of that time that you are continuing to lie to them, and now consciously, They're gonna look back on and say, well, I trusted you and I had no indication, so you're obviously an excellent liar and you're willing to live with a lie, and so now I can't.
I mean, it's just terrible, right?
So my advice to you is that if you ever do something to hurt someone or something to undermine somebody's faith in themselves, you've got like 20 minutes.
Don't, for heaven's sake, don't put it off.
Call them up and fix it right away.
So, you know, that's another thing that you're going to face, is your children are going to look upon you as somebody who is hypocritical and somebody who is such a terrifyingly good liar that they have no idea if they'll ever be able to trust you again.
So, not to mention what it's going to do to your marriage, right?
I mean, unless you both get hit with the light at the same time, you know, it's not exactly going to be an easy transition.
So, you know, the question then becomes, If it's so difficult to get out of a corrupt situation once you're in it, why not just stay in it and teach your children?
Everybody stays in it.
That's the way it should be.
If things are going to be Nazi-like until the end of time, why not instruct your children on how to be decent Nazis?
Again, I apologize for the Nazi metaphor.
I just want to start off with an extreme that we can all understand isn't so good before getting back to something which is more ambiguous for many people like Christianity.
So then the question becomes, what is the relationship between the truth and happiness?
I mean, there's lots of sort of theoretical things, like, you know, if you take sort of the medical metaphor for happiness, right?
Like, happiness is a state of natural human It's a natural state of a human soul when everything's functioning right, everything's doing what it should.
So with your organs, as your organs are doing what they should, fulfilling their purpose in a sort of conflict-free manner, then you feel healthy.
And healthiness is a prerequisite for being happy in general.
And so when your mind is doing the right thing, doing what it's designed to and doing what is right for it, Then you will be happy, right?
I mean, so it's not the most complicated definition in the world, but given that the mind is an organ and every organ has a definition of right purpose, we might find it useful to look at an organ like the brain and say, well, what is its purpose?
And, you know, if it's fulfilling its purpose, then it's going to feel all good.
All the endorphins are going to sort of come surfing in.
And so, you know, the question then becomes, well, what is the proper role of the mind?
And that's obviously a very complicated question, but I'll just touch on it here.
That's sort of one of two possibilities, right?
The purpose of the mind is either to, you know, gain resources by conforming to the social norms, you know, which is a valid strategy from an amoral standpoint.
The purpose of the mind is to gain valid resources by conforming to objective and empirical reality.
This is sort of, do you know or do you get along?
It's like, are you a Howard Rourke or a Peter Keating?
For those who like the Randian side of things.
I'm not going to come down absolutely on one side or the other.
From a purely biological standpoint, both are valid strategies.
A parasite is a perfectly healthy way for an organism to reproduce and to gain sustenance.
So, you can absolutely gain a fair number of economic resources and survive from a physical standpoint by conforming and going along with the prevailing social norms, no matter how corrupt or nonsensical they may be.
However, I do believe that in general, if you can find somebody, at least one person, at least one person who agrees with you, You know, in a really fundamental way, like a life partner, a husband or a wife or a lover or whatever, or even a great friend.
If you can find one person who agrees with you that you can chat with and enjoy your time with, I would say that, you know, that plus being in conformity with the truth is a greater happiness than having a bunch of people and all sort of stewing in falsehood together.
Because, you know, we are not islands.
We are social beings.
And, you know, just looking objectively at my own life, I'm far happier now that I'm married to a woman who I love, treasure, respect, and who we agree at sort of fundamental levels.
I'm happier now than when I was a single man and sort of fighting the fight much more alone.
So, you know, we are social beings and there is part of our minds that, you know, does take truth from those around us or at least can expand truth through conversation.
I mean, it's part of what I'm doing here.
And so I would say, you know, one intimate relationship plus being in concordance with the truth is far happier than, you know, Having a conformity, conforming to the opinions of others, because then you're never close to anyone, right?
I mean, if you're just conforming to other people's opinions, you can't be intimate or be considered intimate with anyone, because you're all just stewing in a bunch of falsehoods, so you can't actually connect with anything real within each other.
I mean, human beings meet in reality.
There's no other place where human beings can meet and interact.
We can't meet and interact in fantasy, right?
I mean, it doesn't exist, so there's no real personality, there's no real self or identity.
So, you know, the only place that we can ever meet and the only place where we can resolve our conflicts is in reality.
So, you can't have any intimate relationships if you just conform to social nonsense.
So, you know, I would count one intimate relationship plus adherence to truth far greater happiness than, you know, conformity to anyone else, because then you don't get the intimate relationships, right?
Social nonsense that you never fight your way free of, and that you never feel close to anyone, and that sort of life of quiet desperation that I think Emerson talks about.
So, but if you can't find anybody to be close with, then I can certainly see that there might be some argument for taking the approach of saying, well, I can't, I'm not close to anyone.
I'm a social animal.
Therefore, maybe I'll just get along with people and not so much talk about freedom and liberty and logic and rationality and atheism and libertarianism and the free market and all that kind of stuff.
And I can certainly understand that.
I mean, that was a strategy that I pursued in my 20s when I was a single man and, you know, was dating and had friends.
And then I didn't turn everything into a political argument.
Whereas now that I sort of understood what it's like to have a rational, loving partner by your side, I mean, it's not a valid strategy.
So that was kind of like my holding pattern, I guess you could say, that I would argue with people but still remain sort of friends with them if they disagreed with me fundamentally.
And, you know, I would date even though I didn't exactly date the most logical people in the world at all times.
But that was sort of my strategy.
And I think it was a fairly good one, right?
I mean, I'm not sure I would have benefited from becoming a hermit because I never would have met my wife.
Now, so finally, but what I would say in general finally, though, is that, you know, if we can convince people over the long run that the truth If we can convince people that the truth is more important than social relationships, well then they no longer have to choose between the two.
Right?
I mean, and that's really our goal in the long run.
I mean, it certainly could be the case that a short-run strategy for certain people in very religious communities might be economically beneficial to teach their children about religion and all that.
But that's only, like it's a tautology, right?
Because people believe in religion, It is worth teaching people to believe in religion, right?
There's benefits to it.
But if people don't believe in religion, then of course you would have the sort of respect in society that, you know, radical numerologists have.
If you were a religious person and society in general was sensible and atheistic, then you would just be viewed as some kooky, you know, shaven-headed guy at the airport.
Which is sort of where we want to get to.
So to say that we should understand a Christian's desire to teach their children about Christianity because there are so many Christians in the world is kind of tautological.
So I would say that we should absolutely oppose it and still call it morally wrong.
Because it is.
I mean, still, fundamentally, you don't teach your children to just maximize their economic benefits and social comfort, right?
Because there's no line you can draw between a good society and an evil society in that, and you would then have to counsel them to become good fascists or Nazis or communists.
And also because by attacking this falsehood, right, by sort of shining a light on this crazy fog of illusion and trying to help free mankind from this collective nightmare of religion, We are starting to change the world so that we can start to give people real choices.
So you don't have to say, well, if I want to live with any integrity, I'm going to be alone and poor.
But rather, you get the best of both worlds.
So you, in order to have a great social life and a great economic life, you have to be rational.
Because that's what the majority of people are.
And I know it's not tomorrow, and it may not even be the day after, but I still think it is absolutely the goal.
And, you know, many generations came before us, and we've inherited all of their wisdom in this area.
And, you know, whatever we can add as we pass along will be more than appreciated by those who come afterwards.
Well, I'm in the gym parking lot, so it's time for me to go and crack some sweat.
So I hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you soon.
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