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Feb. 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:28
97 Concepts Part 3: The Effects

What happens to societies that get concepts wrong

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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It's quarter to five on Saturday afternoon, the 11th of February, 2006. freedomain.blogspot.com, email s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com.
I'm happy to be podcasting now.
I've just finished cleaning the upholstery in the carpets within Christina's home office.
And upstairs, we bought a house about a year ago, and I think I'm starting to get a good sense of why the word possession is both used to indicate ownership and also the inhabitation of your body by demonic entities, because you really do feel like you're surrendering some of your willpower in both of these instances.
I very much enjoy being a homeowner, but especially when you buy a new house, it's quite a bit of work.
It actually wouldn't be if I wasn't so cheap and outsourced everything, but I, let's say, am a tad cautious with my money, and therefore I do everything myself.
So let's move on to Concepts the Effect.
This is part three of the series on concepts.
It will only be a three-parter because I believe that I'll have nailed it, at least to my satisfaction, by the end of this talk.
So I'd like to talk about the effect of these two views of concepts which we've been talking about.
One is the Aristotelian, the other is the Platonic.
The Aristotelian says that concepts are imperfectly derived from physical instances, and the Platonic says that instances are imperfectly derived from perfect concepts.
Now, the effect of these two poles of philosophy in society are absolutely enormous, and it is incredibly crucial to understand the direct line that leads from Plato to concentration camps and gulags, and and it is incredibly crucial to understand the direct line that leads from Plato to concentration camps and gulags, and from Aristotle to the free market, and at best, thinking and he was a little bit down on women and a little bit up on slavery.
So he was no perfect thinker, but he did invent syllogistic logic and, you know, he was an incredible genius in thousands of different fields of human endeavor.
So we can forgive him his minor inconsistencies, as of course we all hope to be forgiven for our own.
So the way that Plato describes concepts, subjects them, as we talked about in the last podcast, to no outside control, to no outside subjugation.
So if you are in possession of a perfect view, of a perfect Platonic concept, Nobody can tell you that you're wrong.
You can't communicate it to other people, and you are perfectly certain of your perception, of your belief, of the truth of what it is that you have within your mind.
This is a very, very dangerous situation within society.
We call this fundamentalism or absolutism in the bad way.
Not absolutism like 2 plus 2 is 4, but absolutism like Western infidel pigs must die and that sort of stuff.
And we generally don't like, and don't get along with, and don't appreciate people who are both certain and irrational.
Now, Plato would be the first to admit that his concept of forms was irrational, but he would say that it's only irrational in the sort of base sensual rationality which it's every intellectual human being's birthright goal, desire, and objective to outgrow.
So what he does is he hives off or he splits off rationality into these two areas.
One is base sensual reality, and the other is this luminous higher realm of truth.
And there's no real relationship between the two, although Plato would argue that you have to master the realm of empirical reality before the gates of perception open wide and allow you to enter the shining cathedral of perfect forms.
So he would say, yeah, by all means, learn empiricism, learn science, learn logic, but you learn those things in order to transcend them.
And this transcendentalism is very common in certain branches of philosophy.
In fact, it is the majority of philosophy.
The majority of what is called thought in the world is a derivation in one form or another of this kind of mysticism.
And it is why the world, of course, is in such a wretched state.
And, of course, it is the foundation of religious thinking as well.
So let's look at how revealed truth, this concept of revealed truth, a truth that is suddenly flushed into your system after contemplation, which can't be communicated to others, that's sort of based on this, for me, always annoying and somewhat eastern style of philosophy which says, those who know never have to ask, those who have to ask will never know.
All of this annoying Zen stuff, the sound of one hand clapping, the contradictions, the paradoxes, the parallels, the Stories which lead nowhere, the, you know, when you can snatch this pebble from my hand nonsense which is all about the domination of the insecure and the exploitation of the gullible rather than it is the communication of truth value or intellectual value.
Well, what are the effects of this kind of thinking on society, on human interaction?
Well, the first, I mean, sort of to trace it from the very sort of root, right, the root is that central evidence is inferior to revealed truth, to mystical truth.
And so what happens?
Well, this mystical truth that people have has no relationship to logic or empirical reality, and it is something which must... it demands respect.
It must be respected, absolutely regardless of whether or not you understand it, of whether or not it makes sense.
And if it doesn't make sense, then it doesn't matter.
It's still true.
Walt Whitman, a 19th century American poet, once wrote, "You say that I contradict myself." "Very well, then I contradict myself." In other words, he's saying that he is in no way going to subject himself to any kind of logical analysis, and his being is, in his being, his justification is independent of rationality.
This is exactly the kind of thing that's in the platonic mold, or the platonic approach to things.
And the effects of this kind of belief on society are absolutely catastrophic, and always result in dictatorship.
And those philosophers who are consistent with their core beliefs, with their initial premises, or their axioms, always end up having to advocate dictatorship as the ideal political model if they believe in this high realm of forms or some sort of abstract realm where logic doesn't apply but is far superior to the empirical and logical realm.
And why is that?
Well, as you know and I'm sure have experienced in your life many, many, many times, human beings have differences of opinion.
I say this, you say that, and people are always going to have these kinds of conflicts.
The question is, and it's one of the most fundamental questions in human society, is how do we resolve differences?
How do we resolve differences between opinions in ways that are objective or in ways that are satisfying to the majority of people?
Well, to look at the scientific method, the way that scientists resolve their disputes is by appeal to objective verification through reproducibility of experimentation and so on.
So, if I have a theory that says a rock falls at 9.5 meters per second per second in a vacuum, Then, that's my theory.
And if you say it falls 9.8 meters per second per second in a vacuum towards the Earth, then how do we resolve these disputes?
How do we know who's right?
With a scientific method, it's pretty easy.
Either one of us is right.
Both of us can't be right.
Either one of us is right, or neither of us is right.
So the way that the scientific method deals with this is pretty simple.
You get a rock, you climb up, if you're Galileo, to the leading tower of Pisa, and you drop it off.
And you measure how quickly it falls down.
And then that measurement determines who is right and who is wrong.
And the person who's wrong might be sort of grumpy and say, well, I thought... But it doesn't really matter.
Because you have a way of determining truth from falsehood.
You have a way of resolving disputes.
In the free market, as we mentioned yesterday afternoon, in the free market there's this question of value.
You know, what is my fridge worth?
Well, I could say it's worth a million dollars.
You can say, I think it's worth a dollar.
Well, how do we resolve that dispute?
Well, it's quite simple.
We try and sell it.
And whatever price somebody is willing to pay for it is what it is worth in monetary terms.
I mean, this is not counting sentimental value or anything like that.
And so this is what is so common between the scientific method and capitalism, as I mentioned yesterday, in that we have objective ways of resolving disputes with reference to empirically verifiable and external facts.
The wonderful thing about facts is that they eliminate conflict.
And that's why it's so important to reason, to base your arguments on evidence and facts and so on.
Now, statistics are another matter, so we'll get into those in another podcast.
What is it they say?
There's lies, damned lies, damned damned lies, and statistics.
So we'll talk about that another time.
But the most important thing to recognize is that where you have empirical verification, you have a way of resolving human conflict that is non-violent.
That's very important.
Contract is also designed to do that as well, right?
And so that's another way that the free market reduces violence.
So if I say that I'm going to do something for you, I put my pen and paper to it, You could say at the moment there's a threat of violence to fulfill contracts, but generally it's not the case.
The reason that contracts are written is not because people expect going to court, at least not in the higher echelons of business.
The reason that they're written is so that everybody's, I mean, on the same page, to use an obvious metaphor, and everybody knows what's expected, and it's clearly written down, and everything's gone through the lawyers, and everybody understands exactly what's demanded or required of from every party in the contract.
So there again, like price in the free market system and like the scientific method in the scientific community, contract in the business world is a way of having an objective methodology of resolving disputes.
So I'm running a contract at the moment where I'm delivering software services to a group and it's about $150,000.
We have a due date, we have weekly meetings, and we have a contract.
So, if there's any dispute, well, we want this feature.
We say, okay, no problem, let's have a look at the contract.
And then we look at the contract, and we look up and see if that feature is included.
And if the feature was included, but I've forgotten about it, then I apologize and say that I'll find a way to make it work.
And if the feature is not in the contract, then of course, as a good vendor, I will be perfectly happy to put that feature in, as long as they're perfectly happy to wait a little longer and pay a little bit more.
So all of these instruments are put in place to be able to resolve disputes between human beings using some methodology other than he said, she said, or I thought it was this way, or it seemed to make sense to do it this way, why wouldn't it make sense to you?
And, of course, this is sadly how things are generally resolved in a family situation.
It's not through any empirical evidence, but rather through sort of raised voices or cold shoulders or bullying or that kind of stuff.
So, this resolution of human conflict through appeal to external evidence, to third-party instruments, to whatever it is that you can come up with that both people are looking at the same way, is also very important in what we now call the legal system, which ideally would be called DROs or something like it in a free society, but let's just use the legal system that we have right now at the moment.
So, of course, the first and most important thing that you need to prove a case of murder, say, is you need to have physical evidence.
And that is very important, and that's pretty new.
I mean, in the Middle Ages, the way that they would figure out if somebody was guilty or innocent of a particular crime is they would have... there were sort of two trials that I know of, and I'm sure there were a lot more.
The one trial was that the person who was accused of murder would take their arm and they would have to reach into a pot of boiling water And pull out an iron bar or something else that was put at the bottom and they would have to pull that out and of course their arms would just be horribly burnt.
I mean this is like bubbling hot boiling water.
And then if their burnt skin became infected then they were guilty.
If it did not become infected, then they were innocent.
So it was a trial by... The judge was God, and the evidence was, were you pure of soul enough to fight off the infection?
And if you were, then you were innocent.
Or, are you guilty of sin, and therefore God has turned his healing hand away from you, and you now have an infection, and so on.
The second was a similar sort of thing, but what they would do is they would throw an iron bar or something into a roaring fire and you would reach into that fire and you would have to grab this red-hot bar and pull it out and hold it for a second.
Of course, your hand would be burned right through to the bone.
And, of course, if you got an infection, then you were guilty.
And this is actually where the phrase, trial by fire, comes from.
It was, in fact, a trial by fire.
It's sort of in the medieval courts.
This is how they would resolve these kinds of disputes.
Which is a complete bastardization of, but still derivative of, this platonic approach to truth or falsehood.
Now, in the modern world, or in a more civilized world, what we do is we rely on, generally we rely on two things.
We rely on motive and we rely on evidence.
Now, we only rely on motive in the absence of evidence, so we rely on motive to get us towards evidence.
So, of course, as most cops will tell you, whenever a person is killed, when they are married, the first thing that you do is you go and find the spouse.
So, if a woman gets killed, it's always the husband, and vice versa.
And the reason that you do that is so that you can begin doing the interviews, and you can begin doing the analysis of who would be the most likely to commit that crime.
So, motive is what you use to sort of narrow down your list of suspects, and then you begin doing your interviews.
Now, the first thing that you do when you're a cop is you get the person, then you ask, do you have an alibi?
Because we know, of course, that a person can't be in two places at once, and therefore, if somebody has an alibi, then they obviously didn't commit the crime.
So, my wife was killed on a Saturday morning at nine o'clock in the morning, and I went to the gym At eight, and everybody saw me in a class, and I didn't leave the gym until ten, and everybody saw me the whole time, then obviously I didn't kill my wife.
Now that doesn't mean I'm not a suspect, because I could have paid somebody to kill my wife, but it does mean that I myself didn't do it, because we sort of know the facts of reality and so on.
So you use motive to find out who would want that person dead, and then you go for alibis.
And then if somebody doesn't have an alibi, or has an alibi that is very weak, like their best friend says, yeah, he was at my place, but nobody saw him go in, nobody saw him go out, it could be an alibi that might not hold up in court, and so on.
So, you use your motive, then you use alibis, and if you then have enough evidence to point towards somebody, then you start to look for evidence.
Ideally, you find that you have the smoking gun.
The cop walks in when the husband is standing over the wife's body with a smoking gun in his hand, but that of course never really happens.
So, you start to look for evidence.
So, they had the means, they had the motive.
Can you find out if they actually did it?
Well, can you find the body, right?
Can you find what the person was killed with?
Can you find if it was some bizarre jujitsu move that the person was killed with and this guy is a jujitsu master?
Well, that would be some sort of evidence that would indicate, right?
If she was, I don't know, shot and you found the gun and you matched the bullet and so on, you start to find the evidence to figure out who did what.
But you're not relying on priests, you're not relying on mysticism, you're not relying on, you know, trial by fire or trial by boiling water or chicken bones or, you know, religious trances or speaking in tongues or anything like that.
You are simply relying on physical evidence.
And even a confession is not always accurate.
Because some masochists can actually confess to crimes that they didn't do.
People can confess because they have a desire for punishment.
People can confess because they did some other crime that they won't confess to.
There's reasons that confession is not always valid.
But motive, plus a lack of alibi, plus physical evidence, plus perhaps an impossibility for other people to do the crime—in other words, it was a husband and a wife on a yacht in the middle of nowhere—or a note that's left behind saying, He's trying to kill me!
I'm in the bulkhead or something!
All of these things will sort of come together to try and establish the guilt or innocence of a crime.
This is a huge step forward, and this is a step away from the Platonic ideal towards the Lockean or Aristotelian ideal that human knowledge is always imperfect, that we always need the evidence of the senses and so on.
And logic, of course, is also important in the commission of a crime, but that's a little bit more of a complicated topic which we don't have to get into now.
But you'll notice that all of these methodologies of resolving disputes rely on the evidence of the senses and of rationality, because what is being used as the criteria for decision-making is available for everybody.
So, in the realm of the scientific method, anybody can measure how fast a ball drops from the top of a building.
You can reproduce your own experiments if you want, as long as they don't involve a cyclotron, which I imagine is rather complicated.
But the methodology is available to everyone.
The evidence is available to everyone.
In fact, that's one of the basis of the scientific methods, which is that everything has to be published and reproducible.
So in the case of contracts in business, one person doesn't get to decide the contract for the other person and keep it in a locked vault and say, oh, if you want to know what's in the contract, you just ask me and I'll tell you.
Well, no, of course the contract has to be open and available to everyone so that everyone can have a look at it and use it to resolve the disputes.
So, these methodologies of resolving disputes are common, universal, open to everyone, subject to empirical verification and to rational analyses, and not a secret, and so on.
So, that's sort of one way of resolving disputes.
Now, if you are a mystic or a platonic or a Kantian and so on, You have this problem that the truth, the essential truth in life, is completely personal, it is completely non-objective, it can never be communicated, it can be subject to no empirical tests, to no rational analysis whatsoever, but it is the most important truth in life.
So how are you going to run society?
Well, if you say society should be run according to empirical rationality and the evidence of the senses, then what does it mean to say that there's this higher realm of perfect truth and perfect morality and perfect goodness and perfect everything, if all the decisions that you're going to make in society completely reject that as a reference point?
You can't logically say that the truth, the absolute and perfect truth in the universe is revealed, but we're not going to use any of those revelations when it comes to organizing society.
What would it mean then?
It wouldn't mean anything.
So given that the central and core truth is a revealed truth that can never be communicated to others, how are you going to resolve disputes between human beings?
What is the government of this society going to look like?
Well, of course, Plato had the answer that you had these philosopher kings who ranked society.
There was no property.
Everything was centrally commanded.
You divided people into sort of gold, silver, and bronze types of people.
Children were taken from their parents at birth.
Everybody was raised collectively.
The government had responsibility for everyone.
A classic dictatorship, a classic totalitarian system that you can find in lots of Plato's writings, but of course particularly in the Republic.
Now, why did Plato have to have a society that was organized like this, which, of course, Aristotle had no patience with?
Well, the reason is that truth is perfect and revealed and incommunicable, and therefore you can't have a democracy.
Because, I mean, a democracy, at least there's some evidence of what the people want.
I mean, even if it's sort of nonsensical and subjective in terms of its content, at least you can count the votes.
But, in Plato's view, the majority of people live in this cave where they see nothing but illusions, they don't know the truth, they're lost in the evidence of the senses and enamored of impractical base rationality, and therefore they can't be sort of set free to decide the course and substance of society.
They must be led.
Now, they can't be led by people who can impart their knowledge to these citizens.
So, if the perfect knowledge is that concepts are imperfectly derived from instances, then, you know, once you teach someone that, then they are perfectly capable of knowing the truth and of running their own lives according to that truth.
But if the truth is revealed and can't be communicated, but is a sort of mentally epileptic spastic vision of absolute purity, which can never be described, let alone communicated to others, but is absolutely and perfectly true, you have to have a society of philosopher kings who order and you have to have a society of philosopher kings who order and organize and control the lives of everybody else, because they have a truth that they So how are you going to resolve disputes in this society?
Well, the simple answer is you can't accept, by giving the philosopher kings the right and the power to rule over everybody, because everybody else is in error, and they're in error in such a manner that they can never be put right.
They can never have the truth revealed to them, because it takes, you know, 30 years and logic and rhetoric and gymnastics and a whole pile of illicit substances to achieve this vision.
And it can never be communicated to others.
And this is where you get this monopoly and centralization of power that is always the substance and foundation of society whenever you have irrational beliefs at their core, irrational absolutes.
And if you don't believe me about Plato, then just look at Muslim societies.
You have irrational absolutes at the core of everybody's belief system, and how do they organize society?
Well, it's a theocracy.
You have these Imams at the center, and they have absolute sway and absolute control.
You have this Sharia law, which is completely subjective, and there's only a very few aspects of human life, like traffic laws and so on, which are not subject to Sharia law.
Sharia law is a massive contradiction and nonsense, the same as any sort of religious group of thought concepts.
It's all just completely It's a complete mishmash and can be interpreted any which way you want, which is why it survived so long.
Consistent beliefs don't tend to survive in irrational situations.
So, if you don't believe me about Plato, then just have a look at these societies where you have a revealed truth that is considered to be the absolute core and center of everything that is true and high in value and noble and pure and good and so on.
And how is society organized?
It's a top-down dictatorship.
And this is also the case when you have extreme nationalism, when you have an irrational belief that's right at the core, which is that race is the most important and the Aryans are the best, and so on, none of which is empirically verifiable, none of which can be communicated to other people.
Therefore, you simply have to have, basically, violence is the methodology of resolving human disputes, in the absence of objective and logical criteria for measuring who's right and who's wrong.
The only way to resolve disputes in the absence of evidence, in the absence of logic, is through one of two methods.
Either both people give way, or violence must be used to solve that problem.
There's no other way to do it.
Either two people agree on a third party who can determine which one of them is correct and agree to abide by the decision of that third party, and ideally that third party is not another human being, because that's open to corruption, and that's also open to subjectivity.
But the third party that two people should use to resolve their disputes is reality, is logic, is evidence.
So it's a contract.
It's the price of something in the free market or its property rights.
Or it's the essential evidence that comes from the scientific method, from the viewing of experiments and reproducibility of experiments.
The way that human beings productively resolve their disputes is in reference to reality.
It is not in reference to other human beings.
But if you are a Platonist, then you don't have that as an option.
You cannot have a situation where people resolve their disputes according to material reality or physical evidence or empirical logic.
Because those things, by the very definition of your philosophy, are illusions, are false, are base, are lesser, are immaterial, are irrelevant, are deceptive fantasies that most people spend their lives, waste their lives in pursuit of.
You can't have them as the highest court in the land when epistemologically to you, they're crap!
I'm sorry to put it in such a base way, but that's the way that it is.
So if you have a philosophy which has at its core a rejection of material evidence and logical rationality, It must be dictatorial, it must be top-down, it must be totalitarian, it must be brutal, it must be violent, because there's simply no other way to resolve disputes between human beings.
You're either going to appeal to objective rationality and logic and the evidence of the senses, or the only way that you're going to be able to do it is to force people through guns and violence and prison and murder and so on.
And that's one of the reasons why this question of concepts, and whether concepts rule sensual evidence, or whether sensual evidence rules concepts, is so important.
It's not an abstract philosophical piece of mumbo-jumbo.
It is a fundamental approach.
There are two fundamentally different approaches to human conflict, to how to resolve human conflict.
And to those who fall down on the dark side of this line, on the line where everything that is in the evidence of the senses and its logic is imperfectly derived from a higher world of perfect forms, everybody who's on that side of the line ends up advocating violence.
They have to fundamentally end up advocating violence, control, brutality, and dictatorial methodologies as the only way of organizing human life, as the only way ...of resolving disputes.
I mean, resolving in the loosest possible sense of the word.
Those who fall on the other side, on the true side, on the scientific side, on the logical side, on the empirical side, can resolve disputes through peaceful methods.
Because they can just appeal, what are the facts?
What does the evidence?
What does the census tell us?
What does the contract tell us?
What does the scientific method tell us?
What is the price?
Who owns the property?
All of these things can be decided objectively, without reference to some crazy lunatic's vision of what is true.
Which, of course, every leader who's a crazy lunatic leader is just one of many crazy lunatic leaders out there.
I mean, if there was only one crazy lunatic leader with absolute power, it wouldn't be quite as bad, but there's many, many lunatics out there who are subjective and irrational and mystical and who desire absolute power, and when they get it, then every other crazy lunatic wants to take them down, and this is why you end up in a situation of ever-escalating violence.
And generally then they stabilize when one ruling group gets all of the power in the society and can just beat down everybody who blinks at them wrong.
So that's sort of the end of where we sit in terms of concepts, but it's very important to understand, before I was talking about, in the last podcast, I was talking about why the creation of these irrational and super concepts serves power.
Now I want to say the other way, right?
How the foundation of a belief system on these platonic ideals or irrational absolutes always results in an escalation of power.
These are a yin and a yang, the two sides of the same coin.
So, if we understand that, then we understand how important it is to use the argument from morality, to use the argument from consistency, to use the argument from rationality, and to demand from people that they provide proof for what it is that they believe.
And if we can do that, then we can begin to beat back this black fog
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