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Feb. 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:31
95 Concepts Part 1: Servant or Master?
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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 7.40 a.m.
on the 10th of February, 2006.
I've been up since some unholy hour.
Just couldn't get back to sleep after I woke up in the middle of the night.
So, no problem.
Energy's actually pretty good.
So we're going to take a break from the family and psychology and we're going to swivel back to the magical world of philosophy, which is where there's some really wonderful, wonderful insights to be gained through the rational application of empirical logic.
So what I'd like to talk about this morning is concepts which are a very sort of misunderstood and sort of seemingly confusing aspect of philosophy that I've never really understood the difficulty of.
So this is a quick take on how we can work with concepts and sort of understand them.
And I'd like to sort of talk about how powerful concepts are and how much or how deeply they show up in the popular culture.
As you have probably seen about a bajillion times, if you've been at all into science fiction or dystopian fantasy or anything like that, we see a constant theme in future predictions or future projections of humanity's state.
And And that theme is that machines of one form or another are going to take over the world.
This we see... I mean, it's become a cliché of almost biblical proportions.
And so what I would suggest as a way of looking at that is to abstract from the idea of sort of machines taking over the world and look instead at the epistemological fact that machines are tools designed to serve the human mind.
So machines are invented by human beings to reduce the labor and to increase the efficiency of thought activity and physical labor and so on.
So when you're looking at a common, common, common, common popular myth, which is that machines are going to take over the world and we're all going to be enslaved to that which was supposed to serve us, there's sort of two ways of looking at that enduring myth.
And the fact that it is so enduring means that it's speaking to something in our popular consciousness or in our collective consciousness.
And by that I don't mean anything Jungian, like exists independently of the individual mind, but That it strikes a chord of truth that is common to most human beings.
Now one way of looking at that is to say that the machines in this case represent the state, right?
So the state was originally designed to be our servant, to make life easier for us, to resolve conflicts, to protect us from foreign invaders, to build the roads, to build the water systems, whatever.
And so this tool, this invention of man's mind that was supposed to be of service to humanity has changed and has now become the master, right?
What is it they say about fire?
A good servant, but a bad master.
Well, the same thing is true of the state, although the state, of course, is never a good servant at all.
It is just a fantasy that is made up in order to gain power over people's imaginations and render their moral sense susceptible to propaganda.
So that's sort of one way of looking at why it is so common to see this theory that machines are going to take over the world using the Matrix and the Terminator and all this kind of stuff.
And that is sort of one way of looking at it, that it's a state that is being talked about here, but nobody really knows about it, so naturally they project They're fears of the state on to the free market right sort of as I've talked before it's a Transposition of legitimate grievance from an entity which is directly causing you harm to an entity which is unable to cause you harm Which makes everybody feel really brave
and discharges the hostility that people feel towards the state.
The hostility and fear.
They discharge it by talking about the media and capitalism and so on.
Multinationals, right?
Things like that.
We've talked about this before and I'm not going to dip into psychology too heavily today but just sort of understand that the idea that what is supposedly a servant has turned into a master is a very common theme in modern literature and popular culture and so on.
Now, another way of looking at that is to look at concepts.
Concepts are mental organizations of discrete, sensual information, based on the common structure of atoms and matter.
Boy, there's a mouthful!
Hey, I think I'm done!
I think I've explained it perfectly!
So, okay, this is the shortest commute ever.
But the way that I would invite you to look at concepts is to recognize that matter, sort of physical external matter, has Constant and common properties and we can call these atoms and so on.
Or you could call them sort of chemical formulations or you know in biology there's cellular formulations and so on.
So matter has constant properties that are common across all chunks of matter or pieces of matter that have the same atomic or chemical structure.
And because matter contains properties which are common across a variety of instances of that matter, i.e.
all rocks are made of rock, so to speak, to get not overly technical in a geological sense, then it's possible to organize these things mentally into concepts.
I mean, if matter had no constant properties, then it would be impossible to organize matter into any kind of concept that would encompass a wide variety of instances of that material structure.
So, when we look at a bunch of rocks, then the only reason that we're able to classify them as rocks within our own mind is because they have common properties, right?
They all have mass, they're all sort of irregular in shape, otherwise we'd call them a ball or a cube.
They're irregular in shape, they are naturally occurring in the world, so they're not man-made, at least most of them aren't.
And so on.
So there's lots of things that you can find in matter that are common enough that you can come up with something called concepts.
And those concepts are epistemologically valid.
And what I have mentioned before, and what I'll repeat again, this is sort of the topic of my master's thesis so I won't drone into it or drill into it in massive detail, but what I've mentioned before is the fact that concepts are imperfectly derived from physical instances.
And what I mean by that rather technical phrase is the fact that if I say that, for instance, rocks are irregular and composed of, you know, granite or some sort of a ganaceous rock or obsidian or whatever it is that I want to subdivide it as, let's just say rock, that rocks are composed of rockness and they have irregularity, they are subject to gravity, they have mass, you know, all of the things that I'm going to use to categorize rocks within my mind,
Then I can't just suddenly throw a table in.
And it seems to me, of course, every single discussion of concepts must include reference to furniture, so I'm not going to buck that trend which has started I don't know how far back, but I can't just sort of throw in a table.
into my definition of rock and say, oh, by the way, I'm going to toss this in as well.
And why?
Well, because tables are man-made.
Tables are not made of rock.
Very few, anyway.
And tables are not irregular.
Tables don't naturally occur in nature.
But they are, of course, a material subject to gravity, have mass, and so on.
So I can put them in the sort of category of material objects.
I just can't throw them randomly into the category of rock.
And just by the way, this is sort of why the argument for morality is so compelling and why it's so important to understand it.
Because if you have a category called the good, then you can't just sort of throw a table in with your rocks, so to speak, and you can't just sort of say, well, every human being should not kill, but a soldier must kill.
You can't just sort of throw something that is the complete opposite of your category in and claim that your category holds.
So when I say that concepts are imperfectly derived from physical instances, What I mean is that if there is any conflict between the concept or the categorization of physical instances and the physical instances themselves, then the concept fails.
The concept is always imperfectly derived, which means that if there is an inconsistency between the concept and the instances that it is supposed to describe, the concept fails and must be reworked or re-figured out or re-laid out, I guess you could say. - Okay.
Now, this is nothing too startling for anybody who's familiar with the scientific method.
In the scientific method, a theory is imperfectly derived from the behavior of matter.
And so if you have a theory which predicts a certain phenomenon and that phenomenon fails to occur, then you don't say, well, my theory is correct except for this or that.
I mean, you can sort of on a contingency basis in the same way that with Newtonian physics you can say that I can navigate by the stars using Newtonian physics and I'm going to arrive one inch to the left or the right on a long ocean journey than I would have if I'd used Einsteinian physics.
So it's a good enough.
I mean, good enough is fine in science for practical applications.
And, of course, that's my particular preference that science be used for practical applications rather than absolute truth or sort of theoretical stuff like string theory.
But that's, I mean, that's been covered in, I think, now two other podcasts, so I won't touch on it here.
But it's important to note that in science, any conflict between observable phenomenon and theoretical constructs, in any conflict between those, the theoretical construct always fails.
There's no methodology within science wherein you can ignore experiment and reproducibility and so on and say, well, my theory is correct despite this, that, or the other.
I mean, you can say it, but you're not following the scientific method in that case.
So saying that concepts are imperfectly derived from physical instances is to say that we get the idea of concepts from the commonality of atomic matter that is contained within physical instances like rocks or trees or hair or tables and so on.
So we derive concepts from the commonality of matter, and you mean we know that matter is divided into atoms and so on, and so it has a commonality that we're perfectly aware of and can measure.
So we derive concepts from the physical similarity of physical instances, but we derive those concepts imperfectly, so that whenever a contradiction arises between the behavior or the properties of physical instances and our theories about them, it is our theories about them which must fall, which must fail.
So that's nothing too radical when we think about it, and this is something which is a real battle right at the core of human knowledge, right at the core of what we call metaphysics or epistemology, which is how do we know that something is true?
Now, And this is what's called the Platonic or Aristotelian or Platonic versus Aristotelian divide, which is that Plato believed that instances were imperfectly derived from concepts.
So sensual evidence was imperfectly derived from ideal concepts.
So the way that he talked about this, and I'll just touch on it briefly, is that he said, look, before you're born, you are floating in an ideal world of forms.
And he uses lots of capitalizations here, which I can't do verbally.
But trust me, just about every noun and a couple of the adjectives are very much capitalized in a very, I would say, pompous way.
But hey, don't let me color your reception of the theory.
So he says, look, before we're born, we are floating in an ideal and perfect world of forms.
And then when we're born, We forget all of these forms.
The trauma of the birth and all this sort of stuff causes us to forget everything that we directly perceived in all of its wondrous and perfect beauty before we were born.
So before we're born we see a perfect glowing levitating angel-clad table and chair and cloud and tree and so on.
Then we're born and we forget it all.
But then when we have a look at a chair in our real life, like in our waking life, we get the concept of chair.
We're able to organize chairs together in a collective mental group called a concept because we have a dim and vague recollection.
of the ideal and perfect chair which we saw before we were born.
And so he uses the metaphor of the cave, that he says that when you are looking at sensual evidence alone, all you're doing is you're looking at the equivalent of shadows cast by objects on the wall of a cave by a flickering fire.
So if you can imagine a sheep, a sheep singular, standing in front of a flickering fire, the shadow, the jumpy sort of shaky shadow that is cast upon the wall of a cave by that sheep is what you're seeing if you just look at sensual evidence, if you just look at the evidence of your senses and empirical rationality.
However, when you can look at the sheep directly, you're looking at the perfect form rather than the imperfect derivation of that form in sensual evidence.
You're looking at the perfect form or the perfect concept directly.
It has an existence independent of our minds, this sort of perfect ideal form or this perfect ideal concept.
And he says that the goal of philosophy, which you start off by learning things like Euclidean geometry and logic and so on, and then you learn rhetoric and then you learn, you know, further and further sort of fields of study, but that the purpose of it is to escape from this cave of illusion.
This cave where we look at instances in the world and think that we're seeing something real, when what we really want to do is turn our attention to this ideal, supra-sensual world of forms, And regard those in their entirety and in their beatific perfection and in their ecstasy of surmounting the physical joy and all that kind of stuff.
So it's a very mystical journey in Plato's world, or at least, well, he wouldn't say that it was mystical.
He would say that to pursue the evidence of the senses is mystical because you're dealing with illusory fragments rather than the ideal whole.
You can see, you know, if I mention back to this email that the gentleman sent me, the fine young libertarian soul sent me regarding his teacher's discussion of the social construction of reality where the teacher says if you're watching a football game and you're watching the Jumbotron and then the cheerleaders and then the cheerleaders...
Ah, the cheerleaders.
Wait, I'm driving.
Let me come back.
So, if you look at these things individually, you're not going to see the whole picture.
And that's very much a platonic, it's an echo of the platonic ideal, which is that you only see sort of one side of the elephant.
You don't see the whole elephant inside and outside, top to bottom, skeleton, muscles, blood, and then the ideal form of the elephant.
All you do is you look at the outside of the elephant from one side at a certain time of day, when it's standing under a certain light in a certain position, and you say, ah, that's the elephant.
And, of course, Plato would argue that that's not the elephant at all.
What you're seeing there is a fragment of the outside of one elephant at one time, and that's not The same as the concept.
He would say that the concept is eternal and perfect and pure and, you know, once you understand it, you get the real beauty of seeing the entire elephant inside and out, up and down, blood pumping, you know, heart contracting, and yet all elephants throughout time, young, old, giving birth, like, it just, he takes the concept to a very comprehensive, let's say, if not insane, no, no, comprehensive, let's let you judge the theory.
He takes the concept to a very deep and comprehensive level and says that anything less is a falsehood, is something that is going to lead you astray, that you think you have knowledge that you don't.
You may have heard a similar story which is bandied about in amateur philosophical circles wherein somebody says, again the elephant seems to be a common metaphor, That you have sort of three blind men standing around an elephant and one is feeling the legs and saying, ah, I feel a column of flesh, or I feel a column, maybe it's alive, maybe it's not.
And then one of them is feeling the ears and say, ah, I feel a leathery, papery substance and so on, maybe it's twitching and maybe it's not.
And another blind man is feeling the tail saying, ah, I feel a ropey substance that, whatever, right?
And they don't see the elephant because they're only dealing with one particular aspect of it.
So, this is a very common belief.
And if you look at it in the way that people argue even down to today, you see a lot of this stuff floating around.
It's very popular at the moment.
It is the foundation of postmodernism.
And it is where you have constructs that are far superior to and independent of instances.
So you have things like race and gender and homophobia and the state and classes and so on, all of which are not derived from individual instances, but instead are perfect ideal forms that have no relationship to individual instances.
So, of course, you know, you'll hear something like, just to give you a brief example of how it shows up in the modern world, you'll hear something, you know, if you're trotting through university these days, and it was certainly the case when I was in university, you know, women's issues, right?
Women's issues.
Now, for instance, support for women single mothers, state support for single mothers, is considered to be a woman's issue.
So, getting sort of welfare and child subsidies and all that, you know, having the state hunt down deadbeat dads and so on, all of these are considered to be women's issues.
Now, it's pretty obvious, and I've had many of these arguments in university or college, it's pretty obvious that this is not women's issues, because a woman who is responsible, who marries a great guy and stays together and they have kids, she doesn't need any of these things.
In fact, she's paying taxes if she's working, and if she's not working, her husband's paying taxes, so it's still affecting her family income.
She's paying taxes which specifically go from her directly through the state to this woman who's being irresponsible.
So here you have a responsible woman funding an irresponsible woman against her will.
So their interests are completely opposed.
And so there's no way that you can say, logically, Or empirically, that women's issues are to do with state funding of irresponsible female behavior.
That's not women's issues.
You could say that's irresponsible women's issues, I guess, or to the material self-interest of irresponsible women, but you could not say that these are women's issues as a whole.
And so that is something that really sort of you can see all over modern debates.
And that is all very much the idea that is behind things like the justifications of the war in Iraq, to touch on sort of another one very briefly.
that the war in Iraq is defined as good, and therefore it doesn't matter what evidence there is.
It still can always be defined as good, because the concept of good is impervious to material evidence.
Now, material evidence may be brought to bear on the topic from time to time, but it's sort of tertiary and unnecessary to the central thesis that it is a good thing to invade, or was a good thing to invade Iraq.
So that's why you get the initial justification.
We're doing it for self-defense and that's why we're doing it.
And then that, you know, fails and then, well, we're doing it to get rid of Saddam Hussein because Saddam Hussein was an evil guy and so on.
And then when people begin to find out that Saddam Hussein was funded by the CIA and that, you know, he was given the weapons of mass destruction that he supposedly used on the Kurdish people by America, and that American helicopters were sold to him, which were used, and that America didn't say anything about this at the time, but actually took Saddam Hussein off the list of international terrorist states, the only state in history that this has ever occurred to, because of expedient political expediency of the moment.
And that, you know, they sort of funded Iraq in its war in Iran throughout the 80s, and then vice versa, and so on.
So, once people begin to understand this sort of stuff, then it's no longer about Saddam Hussein.
Then it's about bringing democracy to the Middle East.
And, you know, it doesn't really matter what the evidence is.
The theory will always shift to serve the central thesis that the war is good.
And it doesn't matter what evidence or theories you bring to bear on it.
This is another example of platonic thinking.
It doesn't matter what the evidence of the senses are, it doesn't matter what logic says, there is a central thesis which is impervious to any kind of feedback, any kind of criticism.
And this, of course, is because there's a religious premise within society which says that concepts can exist with no evidence from the senses, and no logic, and no proof, and no validation, and so on.
So, in the Aristotelian, which is also the Lockean view, also, on the other side of things, and I'm sure you know my opinion of the theory of the Platonic theory, the important thing is not the how, which is clearly deranged and overcomplicated, but the why, which we'll get to this afternoon.
But let's sort of lay out the opposite poles first.
In the Aristotelian or Randian or Lockean view, concepts are imperfectly derived from the senses.
And therefore, the reason, the way that we know that there's such a thing as a chair is sort of we're born and we look around and we begin to notice that instances, physical instances within the world have certain properties and certain uses that are common.
So we see something with the shape of a chair, and we hear it referred to as a chair, and we see people sit in it, right?
They don't sit on the television, generally.
They don't sit on cactuses.
They don't sit on the table.
They sit on chairs, and they pull the chairs out, and the chairs all have four legs.
You know, this is sort of where you start from, and then there are stools with three legs, and then there are Office chairs which roll on coasters, but basically they're all man-made implements designed from similar materials in that they're not sort of made out of a gas or a foam.
They're made out of similar materials.
I mean, not a foam like a cushion, which, you know, they sometimes are made out of, but like a bubble foam, like for a foam bath.
So they're made out of similar materials for similar purposes, they have similar shapes, and this is how we begin to group them together.
It's based on both their physical properties and the uses to which they are put, particularly for man-made objects.
You don't have to put any use to trees for people to identify a tree as a tree, because trees have common properties.
They're all made of wood, most of them have leaves, they shed their leaves in the winter, the deciduous ones anyway, the evergreens not so much.
And then you have trees and from trees you get wood and branches and leaves and so you begin to sort of see the common properties of matter and that's how you define your concepts.
And now because concepts are derived from the evidence of the senses, any concept which opposes the evidence of the senses is by definition false and incorrect.
So, for instance, if I say trees have wheels, I can't have that as a valid concept.
I can't just sort of make up an imaginary tree that has wheels.
I mean, I can put it in a children's book if I want, but it's not a valid concept because there's no evidence of trees that have wheels, and also because a tree having wheels would serve no biological purpose.
And also that wheels require a particular kind of engineering, even if it could be developed biologically.
I don't think there's any animal that has a wheel, both because there's few flat surfaces that would benefit from it, and also because you would need a kind of very sophisticated joint to make a wheel work.
And you would also need the kind of perfection of circularity that nature finds fairly difficult to achieve in a biological level consistently.
So there's lots of reasons why a tree with wheels is not a valid concept.
And, of course, Plato would argue that the reason we know it's not a valid concept is that there's no perfect form of a tree with wheels.
There's a perfect form of a wheel, there's a perfect form of a tree, and so on.
Now, the Lockean slash Randian slash Aristotelian view that the way we develop concepts is through repetitive and consistent observation of physical instances in the world requires a number of things, right?
It requires that we're born sort of somewhat tabula rasa in sort of a blank slate.
Which means that we're not born with any built-in concepts, but we are born with the capacity to develop concepts based on the consistency of material behavior and material uses.
And so it also requires that the senses be valid.
Because if the senses aren't valid, then there's no way that we can develop concepts from physical instances of matter.
I mean if we can't perceive anything accurately, like if it's sort of like a dream where everything changes and shifts and comes apart and falls down and comes back up and you know you're striding through the sea and then you're flying through flames and so on.
But even worse than that, not to reuse my kaleidoscope metaphor, but if everything that you perceive is constantly shifting and changing then you would really not have any capacity to develop concepts.
So the senses have to be valid.
So we have to be born somewhat blank slate The senses have to be valid, and last but not least, the behavior of matter has to be consistent.
So matter has to have physical properties which are unalterable by our will, by social circumstances, and so on.
And so everything that is material has to have predictable and consistent properties and behaviors and uses.
And so, you know, you may use a chair, if you're a kid, you may use a chair with coasters as a little sort of free ride over linoleum, And that is not the use that the chair is designed for, but it's something you can use it for.
And again, we don't have to have perfect accuracy and perfect consistency because we're talking about a biological construct or situation here, which is a concept.
But matter does have to have predictable properties and uses and behaviors in order for the Aristotelian theory to be correct in terms of the development of concepts.
So, the reason that I think it's kind of crazy, I mean, except for the fact that the states run philosophy these days, there's a particularly strange fact in the world, which is that despite the fact that the scientific method is a proof of the validity of the Aristotelian concept of concepts imperfectly derived from the senses, right?
That's a model.
That's a thought model of how to interact with reality, how to predict and define and understand the behaviors, properties, and uses of material objects.
That the scientific method is a lab for seeing which is the better or more accurate or more efficacious thought model.
So, you know, if you have sort of one, you have a race, right?
One scientist has to discover X, another scientist has to discover Y. One scientist is allowed to theorize and test and experiment and have peer reviews and publish in journals and critique and whiteboard and all that, but they're sort of subject to all of the methodologies and processes of the scientific method.
But another scientist is only allowed to pray for the answer to come from God, right?
This would be sort of two controlled experiments that you could set up to figure out which was the more accurate thought model, which was the more predictive and efficacious thought model.
And given that we've sort of had the Early Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Early Middle Ages, and we have lots of mysticism in the world that we can compare it to, we have enough models within the world to be fully certain that the Aristotelian model is the correct model and the Platonic model is not the correct model.
So, you know, Plato and Aristotle could be somewhat forgiven for having this disagreement, because there was no particularly consistent methodology for figuring out matter, the behavior and properties of matter in the world.
There was no scientific method, although that wasn't really Aristotle's fault, because he definitely always said that experiments should trump theory every single time.
But now, of course, we do have the experience and the history of the scientific method, and so it seems that there would be no way to retain this belief without the corruption that's involved in the state funding and control of philosophy through higher education and through its control of the media and through its control of, you know, all of the major think tanks and thought processes that go on in the world.
So, in my formulation of things anyway, just to tie it back to what we talked about at the beginning, which was this idea that robots are taking over our lives and what is the servant has become the master, to me is very related to this concept.
Sorry, let me use the word concept twice.
To this idea of concepts and how it is that they're formed and what it is that they are subjected to.
And this idea of machines that are supposed to serve as taking over our lives and making us the slaves, to me, is very much related to this idea of concepts.
Which is that, in the scientific method, concepts are the servants of reality.
They are imperfectly derived, the slaves of reality, and in any conflict between reality, material, tangible, sensual reality, and concepts, concepts must adapt themselves to that Essential evidence.
Concepts in this view are like water being poured into a jug.
The water must conform to the shape of the jug.
It has no choice.
It has no capacity to do otherwise.
And ideally, that's the scientific method.
That rationality is always going to conform to the evidence of the senses.
Theories always bow to facts.
Whereas, on the other side of things, there's no jug, really.
Water poured takes the shape of this ideal perfect form, which can't be communicated, which can't be defined logically, which is not subject to any external or independent verification.
And this is the root of, in my view, this is the root of the evils that are so plaguing the world, and have always plagued the world, which is the idea that one's ideas are never subject to external verification, to independent verification.
And it is a horrible kind of bullying, and this is the root of the mental plagues that so thwart human progress and so destroy man's capacity to reason, to interact, to be, I mean, all the way down to emotional intimacy and so on.
There's lots of ways in which this problem of not allowing the senses to be derived, sorry, not allowing the concepts to be imperfectly derived from the senses, what kinds of problems it always causes.
And just sort of as a last note, to top off the topic, we can also say that capitalism, or the free market, follows this very closely.
I mean, it's no accident that the scientific method arose and then capitalism arose.
Capitalism answers the question of value, which is a somewhat subjective criteria.
I mean, I might want an iPod, you might want a Zen Extra, but we probably both want air and food, so to some degree it is a subjective criteria.
To some degree it's objective, although never perfectly objective, right?
An anorexic doesn't want food, and somebody who is drowning themselves doesn't want air, so it's never perfectly consistent.
I mean, it's largely consistent.
The question of value can only be answered through the free choice of people.
How do we know that someone values something?
Well, they have chosen to buy it or exchange it or create it in some manner, voluntarily, right?
So that's how we know that somebody values something, objectively.
Whereas in the state-run economy, or communism, or fascism, or feudalism, or all of the isms other than the free market, you have people deciding for others through force what is valuable, what is appropriate to the uses of their time and energy.
So, for instance, in Canada, they say, as I've mentioned before, That universal health care is a fundamental Canadian value, but we're not allowed to choose it.
So, of course, it's impossible to know if it's a value, if it's forced upon someone.
Just as I talked about in emails of the week yesterday, this gentleman who says that the state is a value that we choose, however, we're born into it, already coerced, and we never get a chance to escape it.
It's level of coercion.
All we can do is choose our slave masters, who are all the same.
We can't choose whether or not we're slaves.
So the question of value cannot be ever judged except through empirical measures, and it can only be ascertained to the degree to which people are free to choose products or services or whatever they find valuable, and only then do we know whether something is valuable or not.
So I might think that I've written this wonderful software program that's the greatest thing ever, and the empirical test for that is, well, are people willing to give me money to get the software?
That's how I'm going to determine the value, and only the free market can objectively determine value.
So in the free market, value is imperfectly derived from the choices of individuals, and that's why the free market is all about property rights and non-coercion.
Whereas in a centrally planned economy, value, quote value, is imposed based on the whims of the rulers.
The wisdom or the vanity of the anointed, I think as it's called, or the fatal conceit of central planning is that I can decide for you and force you to accept the values that I think you have.
But, of course, that is completely arbitrary, and it's completely non-empirical.
And, of course, it is completely against any sort of rational understanding of something called economic value, or time value, or so on.
And so, these two are very closely related.
It's no accident that people who are more on the Aristotelian side tend to be more against coercion, and more for the free market, and so on.
And so I'm guessing that if you're listening to this and you're interested in the free market that you are probably, or if not I'd like to hear why, you're probably much more on the Aristotelian side.
So that's sort of the how to a sort of very quick overview of the how of concept development and these two sort of major poles in philosophy.
This afternoon let's have a look at the why.
Why would somebody come up with such a ridiculously complicated and nonsensical theory like this sort of perfect world of perfect tables and so on.
And let's have a look at the why this afternoon.
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