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Feb. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:04
101 Social Fictions Part 2
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Well, good afternoon.
It's Steph.
Freedomain.blogspot.com.
S.M.O.L.Y.
N.E.U.X.
at rogers.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
We are on the part two of the question of socially constructed reality.
And we are talking about this in relationship, at the moment, to teachers.
I'm sort of going to finish off the topic in my short, pre-rush hour drive home.
And so, what I'd like to say about it, to get back to what we were talking about this morning, is that teachers will tell you that reality is socially constructed, and it is one of these fascinating topics that is self-fulfilling.
In other words, if you believe that something is socially constructed, Then it is in fact your reality, but it is not reality at all now one of the questions that arises with the With the with the topic of socially constructed realities.
This is also it's a big postmodern topic is Well compared to what?
You know, there's a great line where somebody asked, I can't remember which philosopher, perhaps it was Heidegger, somebody asked this philosopher, how's your wife?
And he said, compared to what?
I think that's a very interesting question.
You can spend some interesting neuron time pondering that one.
But of course, the idea of socially constructed reality is compared to what?
Now, if it is simply a war of narratives, as some postmodernists will tell you, it's a war of narratives.
So there's a narrative about World War II that the Germans have, that the Jews have, that the Americans have, that Christians have, that Muslims have, and so on.
And each of these is simply sort of warring narratives, as if they were sort of a petri dish and they're each trying to eat each other.
Now, I don't think any but the most staunch postmodernists would say that none of these have any relationship to any facts within reality.
And that's a very interesting perspective and an interesting thing to remember.
These people are not saying that there's nothing but warring narratives with no facts at the core.
What they are saying is that the facts are more or less inaccessible to us.
One thing that's obvious around this is the 9-11 topic, the topic of what happened on 9-11.
Well, we can't take a time machine back at the moment and have a look at what actually happened on 9-11.
There's an official narrative, which we know to be false.
There's a number of plausible alternate theories, which do explain all of the facts, but which there is no substantive proof for.
And so it may be, of course, that we never know what happened.
And similar with sort of the shooting of JFK, there's lots of indications that the official story is false.
You know, more so than just, well, it's the official story, so of course it's false, because that's a fairly safe epistemological stand to take.
But the question is whose narrative is going to win, and there's no capacity to Go back and look at the facts themselves.
This is the case in history, that you simply can't find, you can't go back and relearn the facts.
You might find alternative descriptions of the facts, but you can't go back and re-experience the facts themselves.
Now, some postmodernists would say that our capacity to directly experience the past is obviously non-existent.
We can look at videos and so on, and that's probably the closest thing that we can get, but those only go back, you know, 20, 30, 40 years.
So our capacity to directly experience the past is non-existent.
But they would also say that our capacity to directly experience the present is non-existent, especially when it comes, or largely non-existent.
And this is the case of, as the young libertarian mentioned, You're looking at a football game, but you're not looking at the whole football game, inside and out, from each player's perspectives, top down, from the perspective of every blade of grass, from, you know, inside the cheerleader's intestines to, you know, the top of the feather of the bird flying over.
So you simply only get a small fragment of this, what would be the truth.
And this is a sort of interesting question, and it is really derived from a spiritual or supernatural or mystical or religious view of the world, that there is a perspective called the entire truth inside and out, top to bottom and all around.
And compared to that, then our human capacity to perceive reality is very, very limited and fragmented and so on.
And that's sort of very interesting.
I mean, there is, of course, human beings can't see infrared and so on, but it doesn't mean that what we do see is not valid.
So, I mean, the fact that human perception is limited in no way invalidates what it does perceive.
I believe.
You know, I can't sing like a soprano, and I can't sing like a bass, but it doesn't mean I can't sing like a baritone.
You don't have to hit all notes in the musical spectrum to be able to sing within a particular range.
This is true for even, you know, mono-aural vocal stylings of people like Bob Dylan.
So, the fact that you don't perceive everything in no way means that what you do perceive is not valid.
And to have a standard which does not exist in the world of perceiving everything in order to have a valid perception, Simply means that valid perception is impossible.
Now, a lot of the people who are postmodernists are not religious in any way, but they're still getting their idea of epistemological accuracy from a standard which simply does not exist.
You perceive everything simultaneously like God does.
Then, by heavens, you are perceiving reality.
But if you have to focus on something with your eyes and listen with your ears and only see things from one angle when there's light on and so on, that's the best that human beings can do.
So, the fact that it is the best that human beings can do, and in fact the best that just about any animal can do, Is very interesting and that is a very central reason why to look at it a false standard like seeing everything all the time and saying that that's false is pretty valid.
I mean, there's no evidence that there's any being that is able to do that.
And so the fact that we're not able to do that doesn't invalidate what we do see.
So, the question then comes back to, in relation to what?
Is social fiction in relation to what?
Is it in relation to other social fictions?
In other words, there is no such thing as a true statement because everything is a social fiction.
And therefore, the statement that there is a social fiction is itself a social fiction.
We talked about this this morning.
But in relation to what facts can we say that there is a social fiction?
For there to be a fiction, there has to be a fact that is being contrasted to.
A perspective has to have a truth that it is measured in relation to.
Otherwise, could it not be said, if there's no such thing as an objective reality that you're comparing all of these social fictions to, It would seem to me entirely fair to then say that there's no such thing as social fiction, there's no such thing as social truth, or epistemological or logical fiction, falsehood or truth.
But everybody's social fiction is true, or false, or, you know, it has no truth value.
So the fact that I'm driving here on a cloudy day in North Toronto, passing the Highway 400, That, in no way, is true or false.
It is simply a statement of perception.
And if you're doing something else, so that is a statement of perception as well.
And now, if I perceive that the official story of 9-11 is true, then it's true.
For me.
Or false, for me.
It doesn't really matter.
It is simply a statement of what I believe.
But if, however, you believe something else completely opposite about 9-11, that it was space aliens attempting to invade the Earth, then it's true that you believe it, but there's no truth value in the statement relative to anything else.
So what you end up with is pure subjectivism.
And, of course, all of these things are testable.
I mean, these are all perfectly testable hypotheses, and the testability of these hypotheses is not something that postmodern people really like to dwell on.
So, if you have a schizophrenic who believes he can fly, Then that belief, that he has a narrative called human beings can fly, well then all you do is sort of say, okay, I guess with enough humane padding on the ground so he's not going to hurt himself, you say, go ahead and fly.
Your theory is that you can fly, that's your thesis, that's your social narrative, that's your constructed truth.
Well the question is, can you fly?
So off you go, jump off the couch, land on the nice padding and learn that you can't fly.
So there's a social narrative that has a testable hypothesis to it.
Of course there are social narratives that have no testable hypothesis to it, and I'm not going to sort of come up with those right now because there's sort of an infinity of them, anything that you say that is not testable.
Like if I say that King Louis XVI, one night in Versailles, had a dream of a flying dragon Carrying away a boar between his talons, that's a hypothesis that can never have any true or false verification to it, because Lord knows what on earth Louis was dreaming of that night, or if indeed he was even asleep.
So, you can come up with any number of social hypotheses or truth hypotheses that have no capacity for verification, but a social construct of reality is testable.
So, for example, one of the ways in which people come up with social hypotheses is to say, well, the government is better at regulating things like environmental issues than the free market or than the private sector.
So that's a social fiction.
That definitely is a social fiction.
But that's a social hypothesis of social reality, which is perfectly testable.
Right?
All you do is you say, OK, well, what was the environmental conditions and direction of the conditions prior to the introduction of the EPA and to OSHA and so on?
And what was it afterwards?
The same thing.
You can say, well, there's a social belief or a social fiction called the welfare state helps the poor.
Well, it's all perfectly testable.
And you test it simply by looking at the facts and statistics and interviewing people and so on.
So, these things are all perfectly testable.
You don't have to see the entire football game to know that a football game is occurring and to know what the score was.
These are all perfectly verifiable and testable things.
And it's, of course, a lot easier to verify these things after the invention of the video camera.
So that's why you have in tennis, for instance, you have the judge will call the ball out or in, or the serve out or in, and this can all be tested with verification through a replay.
So if the ball hits the line, then it's in, and if the ball doesn't hit the line, then it's out, and there's a little bit of gray area in the middle.
But these hypotheses are always testable.
If they're not testable, then they're not a hypothesis, they're just a statement.
But if they are testable, then you are able to compare the social fiction in relation to some fact.
So, for instance, I mean, to take the 9-11 thing, let's say that you had a bajillion dollars to spend and nothing but time on your hands.
So what you would do is you would reconstruct one of the Twin Towers and you would fly a plane into them that you had hired, remote-controlled, so that nobody got hurt.
And then you would find out if it fell or not.
That would be a pretty good, or even came close to falling, that would be a fair way to hypothesize the facts of the matter.
And what it would do is it would put one fairly strong doubt into the official story that the buildings fell down because the planes flew into them, if it was simply impossible to reproduce this in any other way.
Of course, it's very unlikely that that's ever going to happen.
Unless some supercomputer can do it for us, nobody's going to build a building that expensive and then just try and flatten it again, or at least damage it extensively.
So, these things called social hypotheses, that there's a narrative that people inherit, is something that you really just want to ask in relation to what?
Is it in relation to objective facts?
Well, if it's in relation to objective facts, then it's not a fiction.
And if it's not in relation to objective facts, then you can't call it a fiction because there's no criteria for true or falsehood.
Then it's like, Louis XVI had this dream in Versailles.
Yes or no?
Well, who knows?
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.
There's no possibility of stating whether that is true or false, other than it seems unlikely to be true that he would be dreaming of that dragon with the boar and its talons that night.
So, the word fiction is interesting and something that needs further clarification when you run across people like that.
Now, the interesting thing from a psychological standpoint is to look at this from the perspective that somebody says to you, well, everybody's beliefs are a social fiction and you know that because look at the different versions that everyone has of events.
And we don't ever really get to experience things directly.
We experience them through the medium of the senses.
And that's only the things which we are even within the capacity to experience essential evidence of them.
And everything else that we experience, we experience through other people's perceptions.
So, I've never been to Thailand.
But every picture I've seen of Thailand was chosen by somebody, chosen to put in a book by somebody, with a sort of particular idea in mind.
Everyone who's been to Thailand, who decides to tell me about Thailand, has a particular perspective or approach to Thailand.
And so, what is my perception of Thailand?
Well, my perception of Thailand is based upon everybody else's perception of Thailand, and they may not even be getting it firsthand.
But everybody else's perception of Thailand.
Therefore, Thailand is a social fiction.
This is sort of the idea behind the, you know, the sort of theory.
And of course it's impossible to argue in one sense and irrelevant to argue in another.
It's impossible to argue in one sense because of course it's true.
I've never been to Thailand and I've never experienced Thailand directly.
You know, and even if I did fly to Thailand, I would get out of the plane and I would go see this, that or the other and walk through this jungle and go to this place, I go to Bangkok or whatever.
But even in Bangkok.
Have I seen Bangkok?
Well, no.
I haven't seen the sewers.
I haven't seen the inside of every house.
And even if I have seen all those things, I haven't seen them simultaneously and so on.
So, you know, by this argument, you can never see or talk about anything as a concept in general.
So, of course, you can't argue with that.
You can't ever know Thailand.
However, it's sort of irrelevant, because what you're doing is trying to point the senses at concepts, which is a faulty thing to do.
You can't see the concept of a forest.
You can see a bunch of individual trees, and you use the conceptual tag to describe the atomic similarities or physical similarities between trees, as we've talked about recently.
But you can't point your senses at a concept.
So, Thailand, of course, cannot be known directly.
It is a concept, and therefore it is a mental construct, which cannot be experienced through the senses.
So, naturally, it would be sort of pointless to argue that the only way you could know Thailand would be to experience the concept directly, which you can't do.
So, I mean, you can hug a woman who's married to you.
You cannot hug an abstract entity called wife.
It just doesn't work.
It's just a collective tag that we use for women with similar characteristics.
So, what would it mean to say you can't ever know Thailand because you've never experienced Thailand directly?
Well, of course, the question would be, well, who has experienced Thailand directly?
Well, nobody.
Well, then the question would be, have I experienced my house directly?
When I go home at night, and I sort of sit down on my couch, and I... Have I experienced my house directly?
Well, somebody would say, well, yes.
And then they would say, well, have you... I could say, have I experienced the concept of house directly?
Well, no.
I have experienced my house directly, and so I've experienced central evidence of atomic structures, and shapes, and colors, and textures, and so on.
So, yes, I have experienced those things directly.
And those are not social fictions.
My house is not a social fiction.
Because it is a physical entity subject to verification.
Somebody's house in Thailand is not a social fiction.
Now, somebody might say, who comes over from Thailand, I have a house, when they don't in fact have a house.
So they're lying to me in that instance.
But that's just an example of a lie.
That's not sort of a big social fiction.
But the idea that whites are better would fall into the category of conceptual fiction, because you're using not, I have a house when you don't have a house, which is a specific physical instance that's subject to verification.
If you say whites are better, then you are trying to create a truth statement based purely on a concept without reference to any physical characteristics other than, you know, the ones Caucasian genetics, which have no innate plus or minus value in terms of better or which have no innate plus or minus value in terms of better or worse, other than Caucasians are better
I don't know what you would say about that, but if you say Caucasians are more moral or whatever, then you are trying to ascribe an individual element which is morality to a concept which itself is not dependent upon that individual characteristic.
Sorry, that's fairly technical.
I apologize.
But if you say, all birds fly, but you then include an ostrich in the category of birds, then you have a problem, because you have A concept called fly which doesn't include an ostrich.
So you can't apply individual characteristics to a concept unless that concept is derived from exactly those generalized individual characteristics.
So if you say all good men are moral, that's one thing because morality is an extraction of the quality of goodness from men.
You can say all good men are moral or something like that.
But you can't say all white men are moral, because morality is not a concept that is derived from either whiteness nor maleness.
So you can't do that sort of legitimately.
So similarly, you can't say that you can have a direct sensual experience of a concept.
That's why concepts are so Dangerous when they take over the evidence of the census and the dictates of reason That's why you can't ever allow that to happen as I've mentioned in a couple of podcasts before So when you say that you can't experience Thailand directly, I'd say well, of course not Of course not!
Any more than you can make love to this abstract entity called wife and have it give birth.
So, that is a very interesting reaction or response to it, which I think should give people pause.
You know, there's an abstract concept called fertility, which doesn't exist in the body.
There's no sort of, ah, I've cut open and removed the woman's fertility.
No, it's a description of the proper operation of particular physical characteristics or organs within the woman's body or the man's body.
And so you can't look at that thing as an individual organ, but rather as a description of the right functioning of those organs.
So, a social fiction either relates to an individual entity, in which case it is verifiable and therefore not a social fiction, or it relates to a concept, in which case, well, so what?
The government is good?
Well, there's no such thing as government that can be described as good or bad, because good or bad only pertains to individuals.
Now, of course, there is a bigotry, or I guess you could say a social fiction, that the government is good, but the fundamental social fiction there is not that the government is good, but that good or evil can be applied to concepts which are not themselves specifically derived from good or evil.
So, that is the more important social construct to undermine.
So, if somebody says to you, well, you can't ever experience Thailand directly, I'd say, well, you could reply, well, of course not.
It's a concept.
So what?
I mean, the concept is invented and doesn't exist in reality.
You know, the concept Thailand is just a descriptor for a place.
It doesn't have any reality in the world.
And so, of course, nobody has any direct experience of these things.
Nobody has any direct experience of something called government, right?
There's a bunch of guys with guns, and a bunch of guys who'll throw you in jail, and a bunch of guys who'll keep you in jail, and a bunch of doofuses in wigs who'll slam their gavel down and pronounce this or that, and all of those are individuals, but they're not... it doesn't exist in reality.
So, for instance, to reply to this idea that you can't look at a football game, well, of course you can't look at a football game!
A football game doesn't exist.
A football game is a descriptor of a configuration of people on a field who are trying to achieve certain goals.
The real question is, the word game does not exist, right?
When you say, let's play a game, you're talking about some sort of specific thing that you're going to do.
You don't sort of pull a concept game off its shelf and play around with it.
And so the question is, when somebody says, well, you can't look at a football game, you would say, okay, I fully understand that, because the football game doesn't exist in the evidence of my senses.
It only exists as a concept within my mind.
But let me ask you this, can I look at a football?
Well, yeah, you can look at a football.
Can I look at the cheerleader?
Well, yeah.
Can I look at cheerleaders as a concept throughout history and all over the world?
Well, no, of course not.
It's a concept, right?
Any more than you can use the number two or spend the idea of money.
So, that is a particularly important thing to remember, that when people talk about Your inability to perceive things, and everything's a social fiction, and so on.
The idea is, what they're saying, is that concepts can't be perceived directly.
And so, big deal!
Big whoop!
You know?
One of the things that is very important to understand about this sort of pseudo-intellectualism, this sort of intellectual posturizing, It's that it's a trick.
It's like a game.
It's like they're trying to make you not have faith in your own cognitive abilities.
They're trying to make you give up the ghost as far as your independent rational thought goes.
They're like confidence tricksters.
It's like the test that the devil himself has put on the planet to make sure that as many human beings as possible fail to deal with the simple basic truths of reality.
So, when you break it down, when somebody says, everybody lives in a social fiction, what they're saying is, you know, people can be gullible.
Right?
You know, you strip away all of the sort of hyper-pretentious language from it.
It's all pretty simple, right?
You know, people will tend to believe what is repeated to them as children.
Yeah?
Okay, you got a PhD on this?
Are you kidding me?
I mean, come on!
I mean, everyone who's six years old knows that.
You know, the first time your mother says, well, if everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?
So, you're saying that one's early exposure to what is true, if it's reinforced around one's life, tends to influence one's thinking.
Basically, people tend to believe what they're told and not go and question everything that they're told.
Well, of course not.
I mean, life is short.
You can't question everything all the time.
So that's sort of one of the things that they're saying.
Another thing that they say, of course, well, myths that are valuable to the power structures currently exercising power tend to be repeated by those power structures.
Well, big whoop, right?
If it makes you obedient, they repeat it.
Well, You know?
Gee, what an amazing intellectual journey that is!
So, you know, the idea that people believe what other people say, that people tend to repeat lies that are beneficial to those in power and are well paid for it.
I mean, this is all just nonsense, right?
I mean, this is all just so obvious that you say it to anybody and they're going to go, well, yeah, that sort of makes sense.
I mean, even if they've never thought of it before, they're going to agree with it as a conclusion, because it doesn't take a whole lot of thinking to come up with that one.
And this is sort of the interesting thing that happens with postmodernism, that it is kind of like a game, right?
It's a game where people say, or this kind of approach to truth, It's a game where people say, I'm going to put the most simple things into the most ridiculously over-complex language, and I'm going to pretend that it's really important.
It's like the Emperor's New Clothes.
I'm going to pretend that it's really important or a big deal.
And you just ask people to break it down.
Right?
So it's like, oh, we live in social fictions and this and that and the other.
It's like, OK, so we're lied to about things.
Well, it's not conscious.
It's not this.
It's like, yeah, no, I understand that.
But so what you're saying is that we're lied to.
And that the lies are often motivated to serve those who have power over us.
Okay, sure, I mean, I buy that.
Now, of course, the next thing you could say if you felt really brave, and perhaps like throwing away your academic career, is you'd say, so, you have power over me, and therefore, since you have the power to mock me, since people lie based on the degree of power that they have, and you have the most power over me in my life at the moment, as far as my long-term goals go, Then can't I assume that you're lying to me?
Wouldn't that make sense?
Or are you above this?
Right?
And he'd say, probably.
Or she'd say, yeah, I'm above this.
I'm not lying to you.
In which case, the whole theory sort of falls apart.
Because then it's just saying, well, it's not even true as a statement of generality.
It's only then true as a statement of facts.
Some people, when it's to their advantage, will lie to you.
Well, gosh!
Really?
Wow!
Let me ponder that one for a while.
That's one hand clapping, isn't it?
So, it's sort of like a test.
I mean, it's like a test of your confidence.
And also it's a test of your ability to, I say ability to, or willingness to call people on the nonsense that they've talked about.
Because somebody who believes in, you know, the social fictions and it's all complicated and this and that, well, it's just they've swallowed the whole myth themselves.
They're a victim of social fiction.
They're not somebody who's intelligently identified it and has risen above it.
So, that's sort of my suggestion.
Recognize that you can't perceive concepts directly and nobody would ever say that you could.
So, the fact that you can't see a football game or Thailand doesn't mean anything.
Because, you know, it's like saying I can't eat color.
I mean, it's just a mismatch of concepts.
So, of course it's not going to fit and it's not going to work.
And just break down what they're saying.
You know, so you're saying, so people lie to other people when it's to their advantage.
But not everybody, because you're not doing it.
But only some people exercise power through falsehoods.
Okay, yeah, I understand that.
I mean, what are we going to talk about for the rest of the semester?
I kind of knew that when I was five years old.
So, you know, don't be fooled by these sort of big words and these over-complicated terms and so on.
It's just...
Pretty obvious stuff that they're saying, and they really haven't thought through it very much, at least not in my experience of talking with people about this sort of stuff.
And so, you know, be confident and just keep asking questions in that Socratic method.
Again, unless you feel that you're going to pay too heavy a price for it, in which case I would bail and nod and say, social fiction, got it.
Let me parrot that back to you on the very next exam.
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