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Jan. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:59
61 The Fallacy of Left and Right

Politics and false dichotomies: the pendulum that smashes freedom

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Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
I'm going to absolutely try and get the date correct today.
In fact, I'm even going to check my cell phone.
It is Friday the 20th of January at 7.47 a.m.
I have to go in a little bit early because I have to do an M&A presentation to a potential purchaser of the company that I'm at, which is all part of the general career excitement that That's going on at the moment.
I also have a job interview on Sunday at a company who's looking for, you know, somebody with tech skills and social skills and product design skills and all that.
So it's all in transition and it's all quite fascinating.
So I hope you're doing well.
I wanted to talk this morning about the sort of prevalence of false dichotomies in modern political debate.
One of the great challenges and opportunities of human consciousness is the fact that we relate very well to ideas and that we are socially conditioned.
And one of the things that I've always tried to get across in the podcast where this issue comes up, or is relevant, is the fact that we do need to recognize that there are two strategies.
Well, there are three strategies for survival, basically.
As I've mentioned before, you produce, you sort of Not exactly beg, but you ask people to transfer to you material resources, or you steal.
And that's really all that you have in terms of options for survival.
And only in the first instance is integrity a value.
I'm not saying that these are a third, a third, a third, or anything like that, but only in the first instance of producing is integrity a value, is trade a value, is capitalism a value.
For those who wish to rely on the kindness of strangers, as Blanche so famously put it, then they are sort of forced to be what Ayn Rand called social metaphysicians or second-handers, or those who don't ask What is true, but rather what people think is true.
And who, you know, if they are asked to go against any sort of prevailing social belief, feel an enormous amount of anxiety, stress, and pressure because they really do form their opinions pretty much based on what is perceived to be true or what is conceived to be true.
And, you know, that's not a sheer accident of life, right?
I mean, it's because for the majority of human history, at least certainly while we were A tribal society, you really had very little chance of surviving without, you know, your gang of thugs, right?
I mean, it was a gang-based society.
You know, it was a youth-oriented society because, you know, the average life expectancy would be about 18 or 20.
You know, highly youth-oriented society, a highly violent society.
You know, I remember having a conversation once with an employee of mine who was talking about, you know, the social contract and You know, how people willingly give up their rights because they want the government, and this is a social contract back in the dawn of time.
And I think this... I mean, I do think that stuff is also wonderful.
I mean, I think it's absolutely deranged, but I think it's just wonderful how people have the ability to just believe things because it suits a purpose or it fits a theory or whatever, rather than saying, well, okay, I wonder if there's such a thing as a social contract.
What I need to do is I need to go back in history and look for evidence of it.
Right?
And, you know, if there's no evidence of it, then it's sort of important to, you know, not sort of say this theory, like with this blank-eyed assertion that it's absolutely true.
And I find this stuff to be... I just think it's funny, in a sort of very fundamental way, how earnest people are in communicating things that are just not true at all, or they have had no evidence for, but just sort of seems to make sense if they've been told it over and over.
And, you know, that is because we have this sort of social adaptability mechanism within our mind wherein it is perfectly acceptable to us to simply spout back what other people tell us as a survival strategy, right?
Because in the tribal society, if you don't have the tribe, you don't survive, right?
So we have the social adaptive mechanism, which is of course one thing that libertarians are fighting.
You know, and I bet you if you dig back into the past of a good number of libertarians, You will find, you know, a distinct lack of, I guess you could say, plausible authority.
And that's perhaps a topic for another podcast, but, you know, that's one of the things that we are sort of outside the tribal system because, you know, I'm not sure that I could say that we've ever received... I certainly have almost never received any benefits from the tribal system of belief.
I mean, from capitalism and the free market and my interactions with others and, you know, that's all wonderful.
But from sort of tribal systems of belief, You know, I just get pomposity and falsehood and so on.
And so that's sort of a preamble.
And look, it's relatively short, you know, given that most of my preambles take about nine tenths of my podcast.
I'm learning slowly.
So this is sort of a preamble to talk about one of the biggest false dichotomies.
I mean, there are a number of false dichotomies.
In modern political theory, and in fact you could say that, especially popular political theory, but you could pretty much say that, you know, all political theory these days are false dichotomies.
Now, a false dichotomy is, you know, it's the sort of, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
You know, if you go to cheesy sales courses, and I don't think I've ever been to one, But, you know, you do hear about this, you know, if you want to close a sale, you say to the customer with a big smile, you say, well, should I put you down for 200 units or 300 units?
You know, should you, do you want to take order next Wednesday or next Thursday?
And that is, I mean, it's, it's, you know, because of the reason it's a false dichotomy is it's not really a dichotomy.
The real dichotomy or the real options in this situation would be, do you want to buy it or don't you?
But, you know, how much do you want to buy is sort of a cheesy attempt to sort of get somebody not to ask themselves a question of whether they should be buying or not or whether they want to buy or not.
And it's, you know, it's cheesy, manipulative and pretty obvious.
And, you know, the other... I mean, you get these in religion too, right?
Do you love Jesus or do you want to go to hell?
You know, these kinds of things.
Let me mull that one over.
Is there any door number three that I could check out behind?
And of course, you know, in the free market, sorry, in sort of status discussions of the free market, it's like, do you want the government to regulate the wild predations of evil capitalists, or do you want to go back to working in a sweatshop?
What's your pleasure?
You know, you can choose.
And we can talk about all those another time, but the one that's sort of of interest to me this morning, and, you know, I hope of interest to you, is this left-right thing, right?
I mean, the left-wing-right-wing, which came originally out of a French parliament, I think, in the 18th century, where, you know, this is sort of where they sat, you know, the socialists were on the left and the sort of the classical liberals were on the right.
And so that's where these things sort of came from.
And the reason that it survived, of course, is because, you know, it serves the purpose of power, right?
I mean, it absolutely gets people into these false dichotomies.
It's like, do you want to be dominated in terms of social policy, i.e.
the right, or do you want to be dominated in terms of economic policy, which is sort of the left, you know?
Would you like Mr. Jones as your slave master, or would you like Mr. Smith as your slave master?
The question is never posed, would you like to be, you know, say, not a slave?
So the left-wing thing, there's this thing called the Nolan Chart, which I sort of learned about many years ago at the Libertarian Conference, which is kind of interesting.
I'm not sure that fully satisfies my sort of requirements or desires for intellectual rigor.
But, you know, hey, neither do I at all times, so I'm not going to complain too much.
But what it is, it sort of says that, you know, there's this continuum of left and right, and on the left are the socialists, or the sort of left-wingers, the Democrats.
They are more liberal in terms of social policies.
i.e.
they are okay, say, with abortion.
And, you know, please don't get me wrong.
I'm not going to get into the abortion debate.
I'm simply describing things.
I mean, I'm still working out a coherent position on that.
But, you know, they're more in favor of legalized abortion.
They are not too bad on sort of maybe legalizing some of the softer drugs.
You know, they're fine with gay marriage.
They're, you know, like, they have these sort of loosey-goosey social policies.
And yet, on the other side, of the coin, the lefties really want to take your money and regulate you into atoms, right?
So, you know, they want more taxes, more government programs, more business regulation, they want all of that stuff.
And so you kind of, that's your choice of the two evils, right?
I mean, the lesser of two evils.
Now, on the right, they sort of favor lowering taxes, and, you know, they favor, you know, sort of, in theory, sort of smaller, less regulation of business, and more reliance on the free market, and, you know, maybe lower tariffs, and so on.
You're But, on the other hand, you know, they want to criminalize everything that's to do with social policies, right?
So they're against homosexuality.
And they want to, you know, maybe Put triple-strength Tylenol, you know, that you're a junkie and you go to jail.
And they're very big on, you know, no clemency for criminals and their capital punishment.
And so, you know, when it comes to economic liberties, they'll sort of ease up a little bit relative to the lefties.
But in terms of social policies, you know, they're much more, you know, Their icy fingers of regulatory power are going to close around your neck as surely as the lefties ones is going to close over your neck about economic freedoms.
Now, the reason, according to this sort of Nolan Chart Theory, the reason that society continually gets less free all the time It's kind of like a ratchet effect.
So what happens is the left-wingers get in power and they're very big on social liberties and very big on economic control or economic regulation.
And generally they put more effort into controlling the economy than they do on liberalizing the social policies.
So they're going to raise taxes a lot more than they're going to legalize soft drugs.
On the other hand, the right-wingers, when they get into power, are going to focus a lot more on, you know, three strikes and you're out, and ramping up the death penalty, and, you know, tougher crimes for drug laws, and so on, and, you know, escalating the war on drugs, and so on.
They're going to focus on that a lot more than they're going to focus on lowering taxes.
Now, I think that this... And so, yeah, every swing of the pendulum things get worse and worse because each side of the coin is focusing more on what they want to control than on what they want to liberalize.
So you get this sort of seesaw ratcheting up of control over your life.
And I think, you know, my sort of basic thought about this is that it was a lot more accurate in the past when, you know, there was some There are greater differences that could be perceived between the parties, you know, even in terms of their rhetoric, right?
I mean, there's still some rhetorical differences between these two parties, but, you know, between the Democrats and the Republicans, or the Republicans, as they've been called, I think.
Yeah, there's not a dime's worth of difference between them at all.
I mean, the only difference is that they have certain historical relationships with different special interest groups, right?
So, I mean, the Democrats get paid off to provide protection to the unions, and the Republicans get paid off to provide money to the military and to large corporations.
I mean, there's just some sort of historical ties to different interest groups, and that's the only difference in terms of, quote, policy that you'll see between the two parties.
But, you know, and of course, you know, there's tons of examples to the contrary, right?
I mean, Nixon put in price controls, right?
The supposed Republican who's big on the free market and, you know, Clinton, you know, sort of claims to end welfare as we know it and so on.
But, so, I mean, there's lots of examples of the opposite side of the fence sitting, so to speak.
But, in general, there used to be, I think, a bit more difference between these, and so that sort of made some sense.
Now, you know, I think it's just a complete free-for-all.
I mean, it's a complete grab, because I do believe that the system has no more than a decade or two left.
If that.
I mean, I'm only saying that so that you don't... I'm not proven wrong tomorrow, but I actually do think it's shorter than that.
Because the amount of grabbing that's going on is just absolutely insane at the moment.
I mean, to me, it's greater than you would even expect from the natural growth in state power that I've talked about in a previous podcast.
So, I think it doesn't have that much time at all, but now, of course, everybody's just grabbing, and they'll throw out whatever justifications they can, but it's, you know, sort of blatant vote-buying, and, you know, pillaging of the Treasury, and running up of the debt, and so on.
So, I mean, for sure, the existing system isn't going to last, and, you know, that's why there's really not any difference, right, between the Democrats and the Republicans at the moment.
So, to return to the left-right thing, You know that there's something wrong with a continuum that looks a little bit more like a Mobius strip when it's supposed to be, you know, positive and minus x-y axis.
And so if you have on the very left of the spectrum, in the political thought spectrum, on the very left you have the communists.
You know, brutal state dictators who are expansionist and violent and throw people in prison camps and so on.
So that's what you have on the left.
On the right, the extreme right, you have the fascists who are what?
Well, brutal state dictators who are violently expansionist and love to throw people in prison camps.
You know, on the left they're called gulags, at least in the Soviet Empire, and on the right they're called concentration camps, as per the Hitlerian and Mussolinian model.
So you know there's something pretty fundamentally wrong with a chart where the two opposite extremes kind of look like the same thing.
Now, of course, there are some minor technical differences between between fascism and communism, in that in communism, nominally, the state is supposed to own all the property.
Whereas in fascism, the private citizens and corporations are allowed to own property, corporations are allowed to exist, but they're just so heavily regulated and taxed by the state that it really comes down to the same thing.
So, you know, the sort of nominal difference is this sort of abstract web of legality that doesn't have any effect on real practice.
And, of course, on the other hand, you have... That's sort of in the fascist model, and on the other hand, you just have sort of brute state control over everything.
So, you know that that particular chart has a problem, this continuum.
So, you know, what does it promote?
Well, obviously it sort of promotes sitting on the fence and not making any commitments either way.
And this, of course, results in people who, whenever they hear anything absolute, whenever they hear anything that is certain, You know, the whole purpose of the system is to keep you sort of huddled in the middle.
You know, to keep you sort of huddled like sheep under a tree in a hailstorm.
You know, just to keep you sitting in the middle to be afraid of any kind of statement of certainty.
Right?
They want to keep you in this sort of baffled fog of the mixed economy.
And that's sort of where you want people to be while you're taking away their freedoms, right?
When their freedoms are taken away, you can sort of be out and out, and you can just sort of, you know, shove them into gulags, and you can order them to do this, and you can kick in their door in the middle of the night, and there's nothing they can do, right, at that point.
But while you're taking away their freedoms, you really want them to be, you know, because they could sort of wake up, right?
I mean, you want them to be kind of dazed, right?
So, like, when a tiger is free, you kind of leave it alone.
When you have to capture it, you drug it.
And after you've captured it, you can put it in a cage and treat it however the hell you want.
But while you're capturing the tiger, you have to drug it.
And, you know, so while you're capturing the freedoms of a majority whose taxes you're dependent on, and, you know, with whom a tax revolt would be catastrophic, right?
I mean, if there's a tax revolt, then The government collapses in a matter of days, if not weeks.
So, while they're in the process of capturing this sort of dangerous predator called the General Citizen, they have to drug him and her, and that's the approach.
And the best way to do that is to make them afraid of certainty.
To make human beings afraid of any kind of certainty or absolute statement is absolutely the best way to drug them and keep them herded into this fog of the middle that everybody gets to.
For instance, here, up in Canada, there is this party, the Liberals.
The Liberals represent the centre.
We have the right wing with the Conservatives and we have the left wing with this NDP.
And in the middle we have the liberals who are, you know, the center.
And, you know, they're always in power.
Why?
Because all they do is paint either side as extremists and they paint themselves as sort of the middle way, right?
Like as the centrists, as those who, you know, we take the best of all worlds and we don't go to extremes and so on, right?
Because extremes, people have been conditioned into thinking that extremes are fanatical, right?
Which is, you know, pretty funny when you think about it, right?
So, you know, if you say there's a really great treatment for angina, and then there's a treatment that will kill you instantly, that, you know, well, you don't want to go to either extreme, right?
You don't want to cure angina, neither do you want to kill the patient.
So, you just kind of put them on a sort of pretty weak-kneed kind of regimen that's going to keep them lingering on but not dead, because that's the ideal situation, is the middle.
I think as Ayn Rand wrote, in any compromise between food and poison, only death can win, right?
But you really want to make people frightened of extremes, and what you do is you paint all extremes as dictatorship, and all absolutes, all certainties, as extremes, right?
That's the basic syllogy, right?
All absolutes are extremes.
All extremes are dictatorships.
Therefore, anybody who makes an absolute statement is advocating a dictatorship.
I mean, it's a pretty simple syllogism, and of course, when you put it that way, it is considered to be... It looks pretty silly, but that's not... Of course, they never put it that openly.
What they do is the popularity of this sort of left-wing, right-wing continuum is portrayed.
Well, of course, nobody wants pure communism who's got a brain in their head.
Nobody wants pure fascism who's got a brain in their head and there's no other option.
So you kind of have to sit in the middle and vote for the predators who take all your money and pray for the best and keep your fingers crossed and watch your freedoms fly away one by one.
And that's the best that you can hope for.
And of course that's exactly where they want you to be.
They don't want you to have any intellectual ammunition to question their premises, right?
So, that's the basic problem and one of the basic reasons behind the left-wing and right-wing continuum.
And to make people frightened of certainty is exactly where con artists want you to be.
And this is true, of course, in religion as well.
In religion, of course, you have these False dichotomies as well.
In religion it's a little bit more subtle, but it's exactly the same methodology.
So, for instance, let's look at the continuum of religious belief.
So, on the sort of agnostic atheist side, you have a bad thing, right?
You don't have God in your heart, you don't believe in religion, you're not a Christian, and that's a bad thing.
Because you are absolutely certain that there is no God and the Bible is full of nonsense.
Sorry, that's not for the agnostic who's just a coward, but for the atheist who's actually got some courage and is willing to take a stand on the truth, that's what they'd say.
For the agnostic, you know, I mean nobody bothers dealing with agnostics because they're just so patently mealy-mouthed and spineless and weak-kneed that they won't even make a basic decision about one of the most important questions in the world that's not too hard to answer.
You know, they're just sort of craving compromisers and appeasers, so I don't bother too much with agnostics.
But so on that extreme, in the religious sense, you have, you know, atheism, which is bad.
And then on the extreme other side of religion, right, you have fanaticism, you have, you know, harsh religious fundamentalism, you have extremism.
And what is that?
Well, that is taking the Bible literally, right?
So, you know, shooting homosexuals, shooting atheists, you know, stoning to death women who have been accused of adultery, you know, all of this sort of stuff.
The closer that you get to an absolute or literalist interpretation of the Bible, the more you are painted as an extremist again.
And that is exactly where the church wants you to be, in this sort of fog of guilty compliance, where you neither have taken the hard and clear intellectual stand of atheism, nor have you taken the insane, though also hard and clear, stand of biblical absolutism.
Both of those are considered bad, right?
One is living without God and living in sin and going to hell and the other is, you know, being an extremist and not listening to the church and, you know, probably going to hell too.
So that's sort of another area where you see this kind of system in place where any certainty either of rationality or literal absolutism from biblical texts.
Any certainty is considered to be evil and therefore you are automatically herded into this foggy middle, which is, you know, where you can be easily controlled, right?
Where you can be easily manipulated.
And you see this in public education to some degree as well.
You know, you're encouraged to think for yourself, right?
So if all you do is parrot back exactly what the teacher says, then you'll get mocked badly for not thinking for yourself.
And yet, if you produce something that's very original and logical, and I know this from some pretty significant experience doing my master's in particular, if you produce something that is logical and original, you will get mocked down for not using Enough primary sources, and for not backing up your argument with enough detail, and so on.
So, you know, for instance, in my master's, when I sort of found this out pretty quickly, if all you do is use primary sources, then you're just considered to be a sort of collator of information, and you don't actually get any good marks.
You get, like, pretty bad marks, because they say, well, this is a good synopsis of what other people think, but there's no opinion of your own in there.
And yet, if you... But if what you do is don't use many primary sources because you're kind of thinking for yourself, then they'll say, well, this is not enough evidence for your opinion.
You know, you haven't used enough primary sources, and they sort of will vaguely accuse you of, you know, not going to the library and dashing something off just because you happen to be clever.
So, you know, that kind of false dichotomy is also very prevalent in education, and particularly in higher education.
So, you know, these sort of lose-lose, play-the-middle situations are just so common in manipulative situations.
You don't see this in capitalism so much.
I mean, you may see it a little bit in large companies that they want you to be original, but they want you to go along.
But, of course, there you, of course, have the option of going to small companies where innovation is more clear.
But you don't see this in Walmart, right?
Walmart doesn't say, right, Kmart has a really low price and Sears, you see, has a really high price.
So what we do is we go in the middle.
You know, we'll give you the middle of the road.
Of course, nobody says that.
I mean, if somebody's high-priced, they say, you know, they appeal to your vanity, right?
And so BMW will say, ah, you know, only a few have the self-esteem to drive a BMW.
Only a few are the proud, the These are those in pursuit of excellence and, you know, German engineering and so on.
And then, of course, they'll treat you like a king every time you come in, and that's, you know, not the end of the world.
I mean, I'm not sure that I pay for it a huge amount of money, but, you know, it's nice, I guess.
And, you know, it's the same thing with first class, right, in airplanes.
You know, nobody says, well, you know, we kind of give you a middling amount of value and, you know, we'll give you a middling amount of service.
I mean, it may be true, but, you know, in general, people will always talk about their strengths in an uncompromising manner.
So, you know, Walmart is like the lowest price every day.
Like a BMW dealership is like, we are all about service.
Like if you bring your car in, we're going to give you a replacement car and we're going to do this and we're going to give you A latte and we're gonna, you know, lick your shoes clean and, you know, press your pants and all that kind of stuff.
So, you know, you're gonna feel like a sort of a living God among men.
And, you know, having stayed in my business career in a wide variety of hotel chains and even individual hotels, I can tell you that it's pretty much the same in hotels, right?
So, you know, Super 8 says, you know, we're clean and we're cheap.
Right?
And there's nothing wrong with that, right?
I mean, it's a perfectly valid situation for a startup business where you just want to crash for a night before your meeting or, you know, on your way to driving somewhere.
But, you know, when I stayed at the I think it was the U.S.
Grant or something like that out in the West Coast.
$400 U.S.
a night.
You know, they didn't say we were clean.
Because for $400 a night, you expect a whole lot more than clean.
You expect a foot rub and Godiva chocolates every hour.
So, you know, that sort of compromise doesn't exist in a company's approach.
They don't ask you to choose a continuum, they simply play to their strengths and say, you know, this is what you get and here's the price.
I mean, there is, of course, a compromise, but there's no right or wrong in that, right?
I mean, so it's just a matter of personal preference, means and desire.
And so, you know, these false dichotomies, I think if you start looking at them in the public sector, you will really start to see them.
So, you know, in sort of the regulation of the free market, right?
It's considered, well, you know, they'll say, well, the free market is good because, you know, it's productive and so on.
But it's also, it's wild and it's predacious and it's exploitive and so on.
And so what we want to do is we want to have a balance, right?
So your options are old people starving in the streets and children working in sweatshops.
That's sort of the free market unfettered, you know, uncontrolled, rampant.
That's one option that you have.
Or the other option, of course, is complete control of the economy by the state, which is communism or fascism.
So neither of these you really want as an option, of course.
So what are you encouraged to do?
Well, you're encouraged to sort of play in the foggy middle and sort of act dazed and say, well, yeah, I mean, I kind of like the, you know, having the choice in the free market and, you know, that new DVD player is really cool and that's great.
But, you know, on the other hand, I don't really want everyone to be working in sweatshops and I...
I don't want to be paid $3 an hour for working 18 hours a day if the nasty capitalists get control of everything.
So, you know, I guess I'll just sort of stay in the middle and so on.
And then if somebody says, you know, anytime an absolute is raised, and, you know, I think some of this is also scar tissue from the 20th century when nothing but the worst absolutes were raised, right?
The 19th century, 18th century in particular, better absolutes were raised, like the absolute right to property, the absolute right to personal liberty from physical attack, and so on.
You know, Thomas Paine and John Locke and all those guys.
I mean, they were working with better absolutes.
I don't think they were working with the best absolutes, but they were also, you know, many of them were deists or religious, so they always had that corruption in their thinking.
But they were certainly working with a whole lot better absolutes.
Whereas in the 20th century, of course, 170 million people got killed for, you know, sort of crazy absolutes like, you know, like religious fundamentalism and Fascism and Communism and National Socialism and so on.
So, you know, there is some sort of reaction to any kind of absolutes in the 21st century.
Well, late 20th, 21st century, because, you know, any absolute is considered to be... Well, all absolutes are bad, because look what happened when people believed in absolutes.
Everyone got killed.
It's sort of like if you have a dad who's got a really, really bad, vicious, evil, sadistic temper, then you're going to be tempted to say, I think, as you grow up, well, anytime anyone gets angry, destruction is going to inevitably result.
Which is, of course, not the case, right?
I mean, healthy anger, as I've mentioned before, healthy anger is the complete opposite of Brutal sadism, right?
Healthy anger is about, you know, it's your sort of immune system for your boundaries, right?
It's like what attacks back people who are attacking you.
Whereas sadism is all about attacking the helpless and the weak who are not at all invading your space and have no capacity to do so.
Notably, of course, children.
So, you know, in the same way that you're going to have a very strong reaction to anybody who expresses temper because you've seen so much sadism as a child, you also, you know, in the late 20th, early 21st century, it's pretty It's understandable in some ways that the uneducated are going to have a certain recoil towards absolutes of any form, because they just lump them all into one bag, right?
So, you know, absolute violence is sort of in their head equated with absolute freedom as both sort of bad things.
And so this sort of huddle-in-the-middle thing is very much the order of the day.
It's very much what is considered to be the right thing to do.
And anytime you stray away from the herd, anytime you start drifting towards any kind of certainty, You are a bad guy who's threatening the whole situation, right?
Like, we're all in this boat that's lost at sea.
It's a little rowboat.
And we are all stuck here.
And the water is sort of lapping up against the gunwales on the edge of the boat.
And, you know, anybody who rocks it is going to, you know, put us under, right?
So the best thing you can do is sort of be frozen into immobility.
And by this I generally mean intellectual immobility.
And to just say, look, don't stand up, don't move, don't rock the boat.
Even if we see another ship coming, don't stand up to shoot the flare because, you know, we're gonna get tipped into the water and there are sharks and, you know, we're gonna drown and all that.
So, I mean, the hostility that you get when you stray from the herd in this manner, when you sort of try and claw your way out or fight your way out or even, you know, maybe stroll your way out of the foggy middle, you will receive an enormous amount of hostility because the way that people have been conditioned is that Anytime you try to establish any kind of certainty, or any kind of truth, or any kind of absolute, you are considered to be dictatorial, right?
You are considered to be either, you know, on your way to communism, or on your way to fascism, and thus you are threatening everybody's, you know, entire existence, and the deaths of millions are at your beck and call, and so on.
And there's just this absolute hostility towards any kind of certainty.
And in the background, you know, as I sort of mentioned in these couple of examples, is this false dichotomy, this continuum of, you know, bad absolutes on either side and foggy, ill-defined middle ground in the center.
And, you know, that's really where they want you to be.
And the only thing, of course, that I would suggest is that that's nonsense, right?
I mean, there's absolutely no false dichotomies in the world, right?
Because the world is non-contradictory reality and empirical material reality is non-contradictory.
There is no middle ground that is in there.
Like, truth is not a bell curve, right?
Truth is a binary proposition.
Truth is a yes-no.
And absolutes absolutely exist.
I mean, there's just no question about that.
Because anybody who claims that they don't is, of course, positing an absolute.
And, you know, absolutes absolutely don't exist.
So they've already admitted at least one, and where there's one, there may be more.
So, you know, don't accept for a moment this idea that, you know, if you are working towards some kind of certainty, and by certainty I mean that which is applicable to all human beings, right?
I mean, as I've mentioned before, the problem with communism is that, you know, they say property is bad, but somebody has to have the ownership of material possessions and the disposition of those material possessions, otherwise nobody can even eat food, right?
Therefore, if somebody has that in a communist society, i.e.
those in the state, then they do have the right to property, and then you have a system which says the right to property is bad for everyone except those in government, which is contradictory and therefore false.
Because, you know, one human being can't have a right that other human beings don't.
So, you know, as long as you're aiming towards a truth and a logically consistent ethical or philosophical approach that is common to all people, At all times, then you're on the right track, and you should sort of just ignore those people who just sort of throw little javelins at you.
You know, you don't want to become... well, you're not some sort of absolutist, are you?
Oh, we don't want to go to extremes.
You know, I think that we really do want to go to extremes.
I like extremes.
I think extremes are wonderful.
I am extremely in love with my wife.
I extremely enjoy doing these podcasts.
I like being extremely healthy, and I think that, you know, all of this stuff is wonderful, and we should, you know, have more extremes and absolutes in our life, because, you know, life is short, and we should not even compromise on things like happiness or integrity or friendship or love, but go for the gold, so to speak, in every form of endeavor, philosophical truths just being one of them.
So, if other people want to compromise and live these wishy-washy lives where they sit in the middle and claim to be good, That's their issue and, you know, basically have a chat or two with them and then just leave them beside because they're just going to drag you down.
But, you know, in the core of what it is that you're aiming to do with your life, I would suggest, you know, go for everything that you can get a hold of.
All the philosophical truth, all the morality, all the love, all the money, everything.
Be as greedy as you want because in those kinds of absolutes, Everybody wins.
I think that the fact that I'm so much in love with my wife is perfectly delightful to her, and the fact that she's so much in love with me is perfectly delightful to me.
So those kinds of extremes are just win-win, any way you cut it.
So I hope this has been helpful.
Thanks so much for listening, as always, and I hope you're doing well, and I will chat with you this afternoon.
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